It's no croc: Gator found
Stafford woman finds alligator under her car
By MEGHANN COTTER
Date published: 5/10/2007
By MEGHANN COTTER
By MEGHANN COTTER
Irma Peil's daughters awoke her with disturbing news late Friday night.
"The police are on their way," they said. "There's an alligator under your car."
The two women, Patricia Strother, 38, and Robyn Elliott, 29, live on property behind their mother's home in Stafford's Green Acres subdivision. Armed with flashlights and each other, they'd gone to investigate why their dogs, Handsome and Midnight, were barking so urgently in their mother's driveway.
They shined the lights under the Ford Escape parked there and a 3-foot-long lizardlike creature hissed back.
Animal control officers first thought the reptile was a Central and South American crocodilian species, called a caiman. But Mark Kilby, co-owner and curator of the Luray Zoo, said it's missing the groove in it's front lip that would make it a caiman or crocodile.
He identified it as a 4-year-old American Alligator, native to low wetland areas in the southeastern United States.
The animal's blackened skin and faint markings reveal that it spent at least a year or two in the wild, he said. It was likely taken into captivity as a juvenile and either let go or escaped in Stafford.
Farm-raised alligators are usually wider, stockier and more brilliantly colored than the one captured last weekend, Kilby said. They are genetically engineered to make better pocketbooks, meals or pets.
While private ownership of alligators is prohibited in Virginia, people can buy them online or in a few other states that have different laws. Virginia alligator handlers must have an exotic animals permit.
Mike Null, Stafford's animal control warden, said his office picks up caimans or alligators about once a year from people who bought them not knowing they weren't allowed to have them.
Locally, the last known loose alligator was shot by a resident as it swam up Accokeek Creek in 1982. News reports from the 1970s tell of another alligator sighting.
Peil's neighborhood sits one lot away from an Aquia Creek tributary. She watched from her porch as the animal control officer trapped the reptile between 11 and midnight Friday. Her three grandchildren slept through the whole incident inside her daughters' homes.
"In Green Acres it was just something new and different," Piel said. "I don't know why it picked my yard."
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CROC
Narrow snout
Olive brown in color
Teeth of both jaws are visible
Found in Florida's southern tip
GATOR:
Broad snout
Only teeth of the upper jaw are visible when jaws are closed
Blackish in color
Found in the Southeast
--Everglades National Park |
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Read more stories about Stafford
Date published: 5/10/2007
Most recent reader comments:
Give him to me in a couple of years
(posted by
NoOne
, Sep. 25, 2007 2:41 pm)
When he gets about 5 to 6 feet, I'll take him. Gator tail is good eatin', but a gator as small as him is a waste of time to slaughter and skin.
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