4-Foot Lizard Loose Near Decatur
Decatur Metro | June 7, 2013Atlanta News, Weather, Traffic, and Sports | FOX 5
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Atlanta News, Weather, Traffic, and Sports | FOX 5
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Um… where in Decatur off Columbia Rd??
Oh. Mah. Gawd. It climbs trees… “A neighborhood off of Columbia Drive” is not nearly specific enough to allow for absolute avoidance. I am unreasonably creeped out by this.
If you are walking in the shade around Columbia drive, I’d recommend you carry a large umbrella. Bird droppings are bad, but this could be a real problem…
Thanks, Obama.
LOL
I blame him too
Called Obama…he blames Bush.
I would have paid more attention to all of this fuss over the IRS if I knew it stood for the Invasive Reptile Squad.
This is awesome. I hope it teams up with the Conyers Liger for an epic rampage.
don’t forget the monkey that escaped from Yerkes!
it’s a jungle out there
Emory or Lawrenceville?
Lawrenceville–happened a couple of years ago.
My mother-in-law lives in one of the subdivisions adjoining the Yerkes property on Collins Hill Road. Sometimes you can hear a lot of monkey chatter from her back yard. She was interviewed by the Gwinnett Post when that happened two years ago. She was not happy.
http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/news/2011/jun/24/monkey-business-not-the-first-of-its-kind/
They never found that monkey.
I have a few questions for this lizard:
Did you come to Decatur for 1) the beer, 2) the food or 3) the schools?
If the answer is beer – welcome! Have a few growlers! Just know your limits, cause I’m not carrying you up into a tree to sleep it off.
If the answer is food – welcome! We have some great patio dining that a cold-blooded reptile could really enjoy! We are a top 10 city for foodies, after all! Please be a considerate neighbor, and don’t raid any chicken coops. But if you have a hankering for small, loud dogs I can recommend a few yards to visit.
If the answer is schools – we need to talk about your plans to mate and lay eggs. If your children will be 4 feet long after 2 years, we are going to have a real capacity problem.
Best survey EVER.
The 13 year old boy in me giggled at that headline.
Sorry to take it there, but it IS Friday afternoon.
“if you have a hankering for small, loud dogs I can recommend a few yards to visit.” +1
If it eats squirrels, it’s welcome to hang out at my house. (Evil varmints keep uprooting my impatiens and petunias.)
She’ll be burrowing with our chipmunks in no time!
Deczilla?
He’s here for the Lizard Festival
Morrison’s alive!
Bookzilla is behind this, no doubt.
You know, we like to make big noise about how Decatur values diversity but in truth, snobbery pervades. Example: every time some bonehead dog or cat slips out, we all “ooh” and “aah” and network and band together and try our best to make sure the little darling gets home again. And here this poor lizard, who surely didn’t get to this neck of the woods by its lonesome, goes wandering a bit and all we do is mock. I just peeked at Wikipedia and I think it’s possible this lizard is smarter than some of the dogs on my street. Definitely quieter.
It is probably smarter than some of the neighbors, too.
Definitely quieter, especially as it’s deliberately edging its way down that branch just above you…
Also according to Wikipedia, Monitors were around during the late Cretaceous and may be mildly venomous. So, there is a poisonous dinosaur wandering Decatur in search of live prey. Not your average lost pet announcement, but if anybody knows where the critter lives I would be glad to join the search party. I always did fancy dinosaur hunting on my Summer vacations.
Pretty sure that neighborhood is south of Memorial, so it’d be more accurate to refer to it as Paleo-Decatur. I’m sure someone around here has already emailed Fox5 about it.
We need the headline changed, too.
Better?
Not even close, DM dude. First, an apology. Second, step up your lobbying efforts to get the post office to recognize all parts of unincorporated DeKalb as either Tucker or Lithonia. We can’t have these wannabe CODers bringing down our property values with their crime and their bad schools and their four-foot lizards!
And yeah, yeah, yeah…I know some of you people take this municipal geography thing seriously, though for the life of me, I can’t understand why. Call me whatever you want. I’m enjoying my Sunday funday to kick off a week of vacation. If you think I have a bad attitude now, just wait until I get back from 4 days in Philly. With my family. And no alcohol….
A college friend of mine, originally from Philly area, lived in Seattle for years. Whenever he flew back to visit, he connected through O’Hare and he swore that he never had to check the board to see which gate his Philly flight was departing from. He just walked down the concourse until he found the one where the people gathered were bitching the loudest.
Yes, it came up at a gathering last night that multiple people have written the story’s author with no response.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS8kP24x3Lo&w=420&h=315
This reminds me of a little song I wrote.
http://www.last.fm/music/Jimmy+Buffett/Off+To+See+The+Lizard/Off+To+See+The+Lizard
I know it’s all fun, but there is a serious issue here. Cities are habitats, just like wild places are habitats. They have animals in them, wild animals. We can’t exterminate nature, and we shouldn’t try. So we need to think seriously about policies that will provide a balance in our nature and some genetic diversity.
This also impacts our decisions on what animals to own. Four-foot lizards from Asia don’t belong here. Look what happened to Florida with pythons. If we want to protect our planet, it starts with our own back yards.
People buying or adopting exotic animals and then releasing them irresponsibly shouldn’t be allowed. Some states restrict ownership but then people complain about heavy-handed regulation. Maybe registration and some kind of training could be required. I don’t believe that there’s any constitutional issues to a requirement to register exotic animals, like there is with arms.
The reminds me of my grandfather’s alligator which a friend who visited Florida presented to him in a cigar box. He released it in the pond at his home in south central Georgia, where it lived a long yet lonely life, even outliving Papa. When we swam in the pond as children we were always aware of its presence as I’m sure it was aware of ours.
Thank goodness it wasn’t a crocodile.
Are you operating on the incorrect assumption that alligators don’t eat people?
No, but I thought crocodiles are more agressive, no? My impression from going to Costa Rica where alligators are in some parts and crocodiles in others is that alligators should be left alone but crocodiles should be actively avoided.
I don’t know anything about crocodiles, at least not firsthand. But growing up in the deep South (100+ miles from the Gulf) where alligators were very common, we were taught that alligators can be extremely aggressive at any given time. We fished a lot, but never went swimming where they were known (or strongly suspected) to be. And where you have alligators, you also find loggerhead turtles and water moccasins. A large specimen of the former could take off a child’s foot, and the latter would almost surely put you in what my father called “the marble garden.”
I plan to NEVER swim near any of those species–crocodiles,loggerhead turtles, water moccasins, and crocodiles! Even mushy lake bottoms give me the willies. I like cold New England lakes with slate rock bottoms. But evidently TomL’s kin were ok with swimming in a pond with an alligator.
I am so glad everyone forewent the stale joke about car insurance…wait, DAMN.
While out running Friday night through Winonna Park a bunch of teenagers were ambling down the street as teenagers on a non-school night are wont to do. As I passed by a girl in the group called out for me to be on the lookout for a monitor lizard. Huh? Crazy kids. Needless to say I politely ignored them and kept on my merry way to the trail alongside the reptile-infested creek.
My brother, while a student at Emory and living in Decatur, had such a lizard. It disappeared one day and he figured it was a goner. Nope. It turned up about five months later MUCH bigger than when he’d last seen it. He was wary about mentioning this to any of his neighbors, for fear they might be missing a small dog or two. Eventually, my brother graduated and, like just about every animal any of us “adopted” while in college, the lizard ended up at my mom’s house. She would put a harness and leash on it and take it out to sun several times a week. Eventually it died when she fed it eggs, shells and all, which it could not digest. So if you see the lizard, throw eggs at it.
Wow. Your mom is far braver (is that the right adjective? tolerant?) than mine. I actually shared this story on FB with the tag line that I guess my mom won’t be visiting Decatur any time soon. She acknowledged that I was likely right about that. She did allow my friend to leave his snakes sealed in their aquariums in her basement when we went on a long weekend trip, but I’m pretty sure she did not go downstairs until they were removed and probably didn’t sleep the whole time, either. I do like the image of a mom “walking” a monitor lizard on a harness & leash.