Lake Windsor monster spotted
The green iguana has been sseen multiple times
When Daniel Ferguson started his new job as a Bella Vista lake ranger, one of his coworkers told him about a wild iguana that some Facebook users call the Lake Windsor monster. His duties often take him to Lake Windsor, so he decided to keep an eye out for it.
It didn’t take him long to spot the bright green iguana, which is more than a foot long, near the Lake Windsor dam. After snapping a couple of photos, he put on his work gloves and went to grab it.
“I got within eight feet of it and it just took off. It swims really well,” Ferguson said. He was surprised when it dove off the dock. He didn’t know that iguanas can swim.
“I was rather shocked to see just how agile it was in the water,” he commented on his Facebook post about the iguana. “It’s like we have our own little Loch Ness monster.”
There was some confusion on the Facebook page when a sign was posted in late July that read,
“Found Big Lizard.”
Jason Cooley found the lizard and posted the sign, but it wasn’t the Lake Windsor monster.
“It was a bearded dragon and we found him in the middle of the road,” Cooley said.
“His name was Smoky. He was real cool. He would hang on your shoulder and you could pet him,” he said. “We had him for a couple of days. My boy liked playing with it.”
But Cooley knew how difficult it can be to lose a pet. His dog had been lost and then returned not long before he found the lizard, so he knew he had to look for the lizard’s owner.
He contacted the Bella Vista Animal Shelter, put a post on Facebook and put a sign out in his yard. It didn’t take long to find the owner. Cooley returned it and took down his sign.
Meanwhile, there were still people posting about the iguana on Facebook. One person who identified himself as member of Herps of Arkansas said he wanted to catch the iguana and find it a good home before winter.
J.D. Willson, a professor and herpetologist at University of Arkansas, said an iguana probably could not survive an Arkansas winter. There is a wild population around Miami, he said, that bred from released pets, but the climate there is better for iguanas. Even around Miami when there is an occasional hard freeze, many of the iguanas don’t survive, he said.
Green iguanas — which are the most common ones sold in pet stores — are mostly vegetarian, so they have plenty of food in the warm weather months. They can grow up to 18 inches long. They are also good swimmers and they can climb trees.
“If it’s one that’s not tame, it can be hard to catch,” he said. “The best approach might to find a long pole with a loop of string on the end. That might contain the lizard long enough to get a hold of it,” he said. “They can be a handful.”