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It's no croc: Gator found

May 10, 2007 12:35 am

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."

The gator moved fast, Null said, but it wasn't as quick as it would have been on a warmer night. The officer was able to put his gloves on, pick it up by the back of the head and put it in a cage.

"I'm just glad they caught it on Friday night," Piel said.

With her job as a substitute-driver coordinator for Stafford County Public School bus system, she leaves for work before the sun rises. "If that thing had jumped out on me I know I would have died," she said.

The gator stayed in a bathtub at the animal shelter until it was handed over to Luray Reptile Center Tuesday. Kilby, whose zoo already houses a number of gators, plans to get the animal back into shape and find a permanent home for it. "I can't house them all," he said.

An at-large alligator wasn't the only excitement for Stafford officials last weekend.

The same officer who caught the alligator responded to another strange report Saturday evening.

A man staying at the Motel 6 on U.S. 17 was unloading a tiger and monkey from his vehicle. It turned out that the individual had all the proper permits, and was passing through after a show in Bull Run.