Yikes! ‘Large lizard,’ humans share scare on Evans
Published 12:00 am Sunday, October 12, 2008
Stacy Carter never expected to see an iguana in her front yard when she stepped out her front door to get something out of her car Saturday afternoon. But the Evans Alley resident knew what it was and called the Vicksburg Police Department.
“He scared me!” Carter said and laughed. “Everybody was laughing at me when I told them there was a big iguana in my yard. They didn’t believe me.”
Carter’s neighbor Charity Bunch didn’t laugh.
“I came out on my porch and saw him walk out from beside the house. I screamed, and he went up in the tree.”
But responding VPD officer Robert Whitten found some humor in the situation. “I did laugh,” he admitted to Carter, “when dispatch called and said you need to come over here, there’s a large lizard in the yard,” he said. “We just weren’t sure how large ‘large’ was going to be.”
“Large” turned out to be about 3 feet long, and the apparent escaped pet climbed around in a china berry tree eating berries and entertaining a dozen or more residents of Evans Alley, off East Avenue, for two hours before Mississippi Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation volunteer Becky Bolm arrived, and with her husband, Old Court House Museum Curator Bubba Bolm, managed to catch the animal.
“He is very good looking!” Becky Bolm exclaimed as she stood below the tree, trying to come up with a plan to nudge the rusty-orange and green-striped iguana down far enough to get a snare around his neck. She said the animal was a bearded dragon variety of iguana, probably worth about $250.
It is not illegal in Vicksburg to keep an iguana as a pet, and the reptiles are not particularly dangerous, Whitten said. “They’ll slap you with a tail in a heartbeat, and that hurts. That’s really their first line of defense. But they are not really vicious animals.”
Lt. Davey Barnette also responded to the scene for a short time. “This is just one of the things we do,” he said with a smile, leaning against the front of his patrol car, watching the iguana meander through the tree, eating china berries. “We solve everybody’s problems.”
While waiting for the Bolms to arrive, Whitten took reports from neighbors that a Ford Road resident was thought to own a pet iguana. He walked to the nearby street and knocked on several doors, trying to find the owner, but no one answered the door at any of the houses.
In the end it took the Bolms about 30 minutes to catch the iguana, which climbed high up in the tree as Bubba Bolm tried to coax it to come down. Extending the pole, which was attached to the snare, and climbing up a ladder, he got the animal close enough to get the snare around its neck and tighten it enough to lift it out of the tree. It wiggled and writhed, but Becky Bolm, wearing long, thick gloves, was able to grab its hindquarters and get it into a cage held open by Whitten.
“We’ll put an ad in the paper for three days and try to find the owner,” she said. “For tonight, we’ll take him home and put him in a cage with a nice warm light and some good food — like a mouse.”
Becky Bolm, an 11-year volunteer with Mississippi wildlife, said she works with about 100 animals every year, most of them babies or orphans that may need treatment before being released back to the wild.