Huge wayward tortoise rescued, returned to owner

HICKORY TREE, Tenn. – “It looked like a turtle and a dinosaur met and fell in love and had babies.” One of those babies – a 40-pound spiky, shelled reptilian creature – wandered out of a Hickory Tree field Wednesday evening and onto Morrell Town Road. Tom Addair swerved to miss it.

He stopped, got out.

“It took off up the road,” Addair said. “She moved pretty good when she got kindly scared. I ran after it, took me a stick first and put it down by its mouth. It wouldn’t snap the stick, so I knew it wasn’t no snapping turtle.”

The creature has a deep, knobby shell stripped in shades of tan and brown. Spikes, some 2 inches long and the texture of fingernails, coat its arms and legs.

Addair, in cahoots with his daughter, Anne, loaded the turtle-dinosaur into the back of his truck, showed if off to the neighbors then put it in his grandson’s baby pool in their back lawn.

“I didn’t want to let it get squished on the road,” said Addair, a retired coal miner. “It’s amazing to see this thing. My daughter wanted to keep it, but I was gonna give it to a zoo or a museum or something like that.”

For two days, the creature lived in Addair’s back lawn. They fed it carrots; it munched on their grass.

“My grandson chases it around, the dog licks it,” Addair said. “It don’t bite.”

They taught it how to walk up stairs.

It occurred to Addair that the Bristol Herald Courier might want to take pictures of his turtle-dinosaur. The paper’s receptionist took a message and relayed it to Features Editor Jan Patrick: “A guy found a big turtle.”

On Friday, Addair stopped by the paper’s downtown office and brought his creature, who he’d taken to calling Spot.

“She was huge and not a bit shy,” Patrick said. “She let us touch her and turned her head, looking all around.”

Patrick thought Spot looked familiar. On the same day, Friday, the Herald Courier ran a story about an African spur thigh tortoise named Lucy who escaped her pen in New Hampshire and found her way back home four years later.

But they weren’t certain, so Patrick suggested that Addair take Spot to Steele Creek Park’s nature center to see if somebody could identify it.

“We were all just kinda scratching our heads,” said the nature center’s manager, Jeremy Stout.

They Googled “giant spiky tortoise.” Passing kids who dared touch it mused of a star-crossed union between a dinosaur and turtle. A crowd formed.

“We knew this was nothing that belongs here, nothing that belongs in the Americas,” Stout said. “Never would I expect somebody to just bring something like that in, after finding it in their yard.”

Stout and his colleagues thought surely the turtle was bought as a little pet, then released when it got too big to manage. It’s unfortunately common, he said. Red-eared sliders, for example, are not native to Northeast Tennessee. But they’ve become the most common type of aquatic turtle around.

“People get these quarter-sized adorable turtles at the beach and they don’t realize it’s going to be the size of a dinner plate, live 30 to 40 years, be a lifetime commitment,” Stout said. “So they take them to the local creek and turn them loose.”

Unlike cats and dogs, reptiles adapt quickly – pet turtles soon become wild turtles, mate, have baby wild turtles and completely screw up the ecosystem, Stout said.

“Reptiles are not like mammals, they can never be truly domesticated,” he said. “They can learn to tolerate you, learn to like you even. But they will never learn to love you, and they’ll never stop knowing how to be a turtle.”

Stout sent Addair home knowing little more than he did when he arrived.

Meanwhile, Patrick returned to her desk in the newsroom and had a voice message from a man named Jeff Roark. He said if anyone contacted the paper about finding a big, strange-looking turtle, it was probably his pet, an African spur thigh tortoise called Lilly.

“I’m thrilled to death to have her back,” Roark said Friday, as Lilly plodded around the Addair’s back lawn.

Roark, who used to manage an exotic pet store in Bristol, Va., said that when he bought Lilly five years ago, she was a month old and the size of a coffee cup. She might live more than 80 years and bulk up to 125 pounds.

Roark got home from work about 7 p.m. Wednesday and noticed Lilly missing from her pen, where she lives with two other tortoises, Eddie and Herman.

“I kept hoping she’d miss her playmates and come back,” he said.

An hour later and a half mile away, Addair found her booking across the road.

Stout, at the nature center, said that if Addair hadn’t picked her up, she likely wouldn’t have made it through the winter.

“I’m just tickled to death,” Stout said. “Let’s face it, usually with turtles and tortoises, they’re set loose, they’re not escapees. It’s kinda funny to think of this giant tortoise making a jail break. But now, knowing that she’s somebody’s pet, that somebody loves her, that just makes my day.”

Roark offered a reward, but the Addairs wouldn’t take it. They’ve volunteered to “turtle-sit” if ever an occasion presents itself. Addair’s grandson called dibs on one of Lilly’s babies, in a few years when she’s old enough to have them.

Addair fancies himself the turtle’s hero.

“We’ve done got attached to it,” he said. “And I hope he lets us come visit every once in awhile.”

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531