Return of <i> Mr.</i> Turtle : Long Beach Pet Missing for 10 Years Turns Up in Santa Maria, No Longer a Female

Excuse him if he’s a little shell-shocked.

But the world of a turtle named Myrtle, who turned out to be Byrtle, continued to grow Thursday.

The California desert tortoise disappeared from a tiny Long Beach pen 10 years ago and was recently discovered strolling down the street in Santa Maria, 191 miles away.

The 11-pound reptile started out as Myrtle and ended up Byrtle.

“We’d thought it was a female. So the kids named it Myrtle and put it in the back yard,” explained William Ridgeway Sr., an orthodontist who received the animal about a dozen years ago from a patient who was moving out of town.

The kids have grown up since then. Susie Ridgeway, 25, has become a hotel worker who knows how to make a guest feel comfortable. Bill Ridgeway Jr., 27, has become a veterinarian who knows how to tell a Myrtle turtle from a Byrtle turtle.

After being reunited with their traveling tortoise, the pair helped design a secure, 12-foot-square wooden pen as a back yard home for the turtle named Byrtle.

Maybe it should have been renamed Houdini, said Ridgeway Sr.

“She, er, he was always getting out of the yard,” the older Ridgeway recalled Thursday. “We’d trained the children in the neighborhood to catch him when he got away. Even the mailman would bring him back when he got out.”

It was a stranger, however, who apparently found Byrtle boogieing down a Long Beach street in 1982. That person kept it as a pet. Eventually, the new owner took Byrtle to Santa Maria, surmised Ridgeway the orthodontist.

Along the way, the tortoise either was dropped on its back or hit by a car; its shell has been cracked and repaired with fiberglass. Expertly, too, said Ridgeway the veterinarian.

A Santa Maria schoolteacher spotted the reptile plodding down a street a few weeks ago and turned it over to Donna Waddell, a volunteer turtle keeper for the state’s Department of Fish and Game who lives in the Central Coast city.

Because desert tortoises are considered a threatened species--officials figure as few as 60,000 live in the wild--a permit is required to keep them as pets. To Waddell’s surprise, a decal bearing permit number 15567 remained glued to Byrtle’s underside.

Waddell used the number to track down the Ridgeways.

“I was as excited as they were when I called them,” said Waddell, who has taken in 50 tortoises over the years. Any of the decals that may have been on those animals apparently had rubbed off, she said.

Turtles found wandering in urban areas are probably pets, she added. That means they would not survive if released in the wild.

Stories this week in several editions of The Times about Byrtle’s return prompted television coverage Thursday, including internationally broadcast reports on CNN.

Waddell said the celebrity turtle’s tube time isn’t likely to send his Santa Maria “owner” rushing to reclaim him, however.

“They’re not going to fuss,” she predicted of whoever had possessed the tortoise. “If they do, they’ll be slapped with a $1,000 fine for not having a permit for him.”

Ridgeway Sr. said a friend jokingly calculated that the tortoise would have had to travel about a third of a mile a week to get to Santa Maria from Long Beach, if it had walked there.

But Byrtle will be in no hurry if he ever takes another hike. Or another hitchhike.

The tortoise is about 45 years old, Ridgeway estimated.

“And they live to be 100.”

Times correspondent Peggy Y. Lee in Ventura contributed to this story.