Mangrove Monitor Rescued From Burlington Parking Lot
Animal-control officers safely captured a four-foot-plus mangrove monitor after it entered a vehicle’s wheel well in Burlington, Massachusetts.
A four-foot-plus exotic lizard turned an ordinary Burlington, Massachusetts, parking lot into an animal-control call after it was seen running down the road and disappearing into a parked vehicle’s wheel well. The animal was a mangrove monitor, a species far more at home in tropical environments than beside a Massachusetts shopping area.
Burlington Police Animal Control safely rescued the reptile from the vehicle, with assistance from Cambridge Animal Control and Rainforest Reptile Shows. The rescue involved finding the monitor inside the wheel well and transferring it to Rainforest Reptile Shows for specialized care, turning what could have become a difficult roadside extraction into a controlled handoff.
The capture was handled by animal-control officer Jamie Jeffrey, who found the lizard in the vehicle’s wheel well with help from Cambridge officers. UPI reported that the monitor was healthy aside from a small wound on its head and was taken into care while officials sought its owner.
A wheel well is an especially inconvenient place to discover a large reptile: confined enough to make access difficult, but connected to a vehicle that could move before anyone realizes what has crawled inside. In this case, the animal’s choice of shelter kept it contained long enough for trained officers and reptile specialists to remove it safely.
The incident also raises a straightforward ownership question. Boston.com notes that possessing a mangrove monitor in Massachusetts requires proper permitting, so officials are not simply looking for whoever lost a pet; they are also determining whether the animal was legally kept. For now, the monitor is in specialized care, with its small injury reported as the only health issue identified after an otherwise unusual trip from the roadside to a wheel well.