By ERIC HORSTING

Staff Writer

Last Sunday, a family discovered a crocodile in a pond on the American Youth Hostel property on Cove Road.

Jose Fonseca and his wife and two young sons were walking on a trail near the pond at the hostel when the children saw a 2-foot-long crocodile near the edge of the pond, which feeds into Fisher Pond, according to Judy Mulhair, the hostel’s owner.

The children pointed out the crocodile to their father, who later told Mulhair that it looked like a stick to him. But according to Mulhair, the children insisted, telling him, “But Dad, there’s a crocodile there.”

The Fonsecas left the hostel on Monday.

Mulhair said last week that she didn’t have time to look for the croc on Sunday because she was cleaning the cabin.

Come Monday, Mulhair, who also works as a flight attendant and was on her way to Japan, called Russell Crump, who watches the hostel for her while she’s away, and asked him to search for it.

On Wednesday, when she returned to Seattle, she called Crump from the airport, and he told her that he had found it.

Crump, who is from Louisiana and has experience there with alligators, had gone out to search for the crocodile on Monday, as Mulhair had asked.

“It took me two hours,” he said, “but I finally found it.”

Crump said that the croc was quite vicious, hissing and trying to bite him, and it didn’t want to be picked up, but Crump managed to take it by the tail and put it in a bucket.

He then transported it to a bathtub in the hostel’s main building. He tried to create an appropriate environment by drawing water into the tub and piling a towel in it to make a little island.

Mulhair said, “Russell spent two hours looking for it. I would have given up after 15 minutes. And I haven’t been back there to look for brothers or sisters.”

She added that she had called the Woodland Park Zoo, and the person there told her he was shocked because he couldn’t imagine the crocodile living even a day outside.

Based on descriptions, experts say the crocodile is a cayman, “Caiman crocodilus,” technically. The animal is a native of Central and South America.

“House temperature is not enough for them,” Mulhair said she learned from the zookeeper. “They need about 110 degrees.”

When a reporter visited Mulhair and Crump on Wednesday, the cayman had been in the freezer for two hours. Crump had thought the creature was dead, and Mulhair asked him to preserve it in the freezer.

But when the croc was pulled out and placed on a table, it seemed possible to Crump that one of the eyes had opened. And rigor mortis had clearly not set in.

Sergeant Kim Chandler of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife reported on Monday that Crump had called him on Tuesday. “We were going to come out and get it,” Chandler said, “but Crump reported that it wasn’t looking so good.”

“It’s a typical story,” said Chandler. “We get one or two of these a year. People buy them in pet stores when they are 5 inches long, but when they grow to 2 feet, they feel like they can’t handle them anymore, so they take them out and drop them off in a local pond.”

He said that they have been found in Green Lake and at the Arboretum in Seattle. They are not usually escaped animals, he said.

The Vashon cayman eventually did die, presumably from the lack of heat it needed to survive, and Crump reportedly was thinking about skinning it and making a hat from it.