Tucker the Turtle hitches home

We’re glad to hear that Tucker the Eastern Box Turtle has found a ride back to his old Kentucky home.

Winter’s coming, and the poor little homeless reptile would probably feel out of sorts north of the Mason-Dixon line when the snow flies.

Not that he’d be stuck in a snow drift or anything. The folks at the Animal Humane Society would have taken care of that.

But still, they felt it best that Tucker head home after he was handed off by a Good Samaritan trucker who found him in the road with a cracked shell. So they put out a call for a ride.

By the afternoon, Tucker was a bona fide media star, and he had a driver: Greg Staffa, a Farmington guy with a serious do-gooder streak who’s known homelessness himself, and who’s really into the whole Twitter thing:

“With foreclosures, job loses and more I think we can all relate to a Turtle Named Tucker. Just a little guy needing a hand to get home,” he says.

And so on Saturday, Tucker and Staffa hit the road for the Broadbent Wildlife Sanctuary in Irvington, Ky. It’s a good long haul: