Police nab fugitive tortoise on slow run to freedom

On an interstate highway between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, drivers on their morning commute called 911 to report a runaway. A very ... very ... slow one.

He was miles from home and ambling across the four-lane highway when he was finally caught by police.

State troopers, with the help of a few good Samaritans, stopped traffic and picked up the escapee: Stitch, a giant sulcata tortoise with a sand-colored shell.

The 14-year-old tortoise had broken out of his enclosure and a few layers of fences at the nearby Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch, a roadside animal park open to the public, before making a run for it. Danna Cogburn, an owner of the ranch, said he had been missing for two to three hours before officers told the owners they had found him on the road.

“How in the world or where he got out?” Cogburn said. “I’m not really sure.” She said Stitch was one of only two tortoises on the ranch who were small enough to have made it through the fence. “He had to work at it and be very determined.”

The night before his July 30 escape, Cogburn said, storms had damaged some of the ranch’s gates and enclosures, including the area where the tortoises are kept.

“We came in the next morning and saw tortoises scattered here, there and yonder as they went roaming around,” she said. After gathering them back together and going through roll call, they realized Stitch was missing and sent out a search party.

Meanwhile, emergency dispatchers began receiving calls by 8 a.m. from drivers reporting that a tortoise was attempting to cross eastbound Interstate 10 near Picacho, Arizona.

“Our troopers in the area couldn’t believe this,” said Bart Graves, a public information officer at Arizona’s Department of Public Safety, adding drivers sometimes misidentified what they saw when driving.

But to the officers’ surprise when they arrived, the tortoise was indeed about halfway across the road. Sgt. Steven Sekrecki recognized the tortoise’s name tag etched in black on the front of his light shell. He remembered Stitch from his visits with his daughter and wife to the family-run ranch down the road.

Shortly after, he passed the fugitive tortoise over the fence and back to his owners.

Graves said the officers in the area had responded to calls related to ducks, cattle and a cat, but never a tortoise. He added that police were glad people had reported the tortoise without trying to rescue it themselves along a busy highway.

Stitch was also in danger. And his species, also known as the African spurred tortoise, is endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

So why did the tortoise cross the road? Cogburn has a theory.

“I think Stitch must have been out on the hunt for a girl,” she said. She noted that it is breeding season, and the enclosure at the ranch is filled with only males, like Stitch. “You know how teenage boys are when it comes to girls.”

The Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch, a third-generation family-run ranch, adopted Stitch along with another tortoise named Crook about two years ago from a woman moving out of the state. Cogburn said Stitch is known for being small and fast, for a tortoise, and he’s not as much of a lover as the others.

The giant sulcata tortoise can grow up to 30 inches in length and weigh more than 100 pounds, according to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Stitch was a little less than 80 pounds when adopted, Cogburn said, and he is still smaller than the handful of other tortoises the ranch owns. Her tortoises, which many believe to be slow, often run up to people at the ranch when visitors feed them pieces of asparagus.

The ranch has several other animals that visitors can interact with, including ostriches, miniature donkeys, deer, goats, chickens and even stingrays. But none of the animals have made it as far out of the ranch as Stitch did.

Cogburn said she was grateful Stitch had gotten off the road and safely back home.

“He probably has great stories to go back and tell his buddies,” Cogburn said.