7-foot alligator captured in Wake County pond had been there for years, officials say
An alligator was found far from home in Wake County, officials say.
The 7.5-foot gator was captured Monday from a pond on Hilltop Road in Fuquay-Varina, Greg Batts, a wildlife biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, told McClatchy News on Thursday.
Officials had been trying to capture it for two weeks, after a neighbor reported it. But it’s believed to have been living there much longer.
Neighbors told wildlife officials the alligator started out as a pet but, once it got too big, was released into the pond, where it lived for at least the last decade, according to Batts.
Alligators are not naturally found this far inland in North Carolina, Batts said, but sometimes people will illegally bring them to the area as pets and they eventually end up in the wild.
He said in the Piedmont, officials deal with gators that have been released into the wild once or twice a year.
Owning any native wildlife species is illegal in the state.
Batts said the alligator had become a bit of a “tourist attraction” and that as a new subdivision was being built near the pond — and more people started coming around — a neighbor decided to report it.
Officials captured it using a Murphy trap, which uses bait, bungee cords and cable snares to pull the alligator from the water, Batts says.
The alligator has since been relocated to a remote area in southeastern North Carolina.
Alligators are common in some coastal areas of the state, according to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. A map on the site shows the areas where they are naturally found.
The gator found in Wake was about average size for North Carolina, Batts said. They grow bigger in other places, like Florida, but are smaller here. Because of the colder temperatures, their growing season is shorter.
Batts said he expects the gator will do well living in its new home, as it had been surviving on frogs, turtles and snakes in the Wake County pond. So it shouldn’t have a problem surviving in a similar — or even better — environment on the coast.
Wildlife officials put a transmitter on it to track its movements as part of a study it’s conducting on alligators.
But they have hopes beyond the study as the gator is a female that’s just entering her reproductive age.
“We hope that it would meet some more of its kind and produce more alligators,” Batts said.
This story was originally published May 7, 2020 at 4:04 PM with the headline "7-foot alligator captured in Wake County pond had been there for years, officials say."
