Windsor couple rescue giant iguana from Ganatchio Trail

WINDSOR, Ont. — A big, green, scaly surprise landed Saturday in Marcel and Maryann Morin’s bathtub.

The east-end couple were thunderstruck when they happened upon the creature — a massive iguana — as they biked down the Ganatchio Trail. The couple took the creature, which they say was near death, home to nurse it back to health.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Marcel. “It’s huge.” He said he measured the giant lizard and it came close to six feet long.

“It’s pretty scary to look at.”

Maryann said she thought the iguana was a snake when she and her husband first spotted it. But when Marcel went to pick it up, they saw what it really was.

“It was on its back and it was white,” she said. “The poor thing. I thought that it was dead.”

Bundling it up in a pair of jackets, the Morins took the iguana home and placed it in their bathtub, warming it with a heating lamp normally used for their daughter’s hermit crabs. Maryann said the iguana’s green colour returned under the light.

“I have a feeling someone left it there to die because they didn’t want to care for it,” she said.

But finding someone to take the lizard off their hands wasn’t easy. She said Erie Wildlife Rescue and the Humane Society wouldn’t take it. She said it would be turned over to animal outreach program Zoo 2 You.

But humane society executive director Melanie Coulter said she didn’t believe her organization had been called.

“We would’ve taken it,” she said Sunday. And it wouldn’t have been the first time: the humane society has handled lost iguanas before, though finding them homes is tough.

Many people buy them when they’re small, Coulter said, but “unfortunately they keep growing and growing. You need a lot of space to care for them properly.”

Coulter said next time someone stumbles across a stray iguana they should call the humane society.