It’s just another day in the life of a police officer in McKean County — traffic stops, complaint investigations, wrestling an alligator…

Foster Township Police received a unique call around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday — “We have a report of an alligator crawling in the road and now crawling into a yard on Derrick Road.”

Officer Shaun McDonald told The Era, “We thought, ‘Alright, this is not good. It’s probably going to be a mental health call.’”

So he drove out Derrick Road and saw a vehicle pulled over by the side of the road, and several people standing around, looking up into a yard.

“We got out and I said, ‘Is there an alligator up there?’ People said yes,” McDonald explained. He looked for himself.

“So there is an alligator.”

McDonald, a trained police officer but not an expert reptile wrangler, relied on all the late Steve Irwin taught him from old episodes of “The Crocodile Hunter” and went in after it.

He had a rope with a loop on the end, some electrical tape and the support of the crowd gathered as he slowly lowered the loop over the reptile’s snout.

A miss.

It took a careful hand and some wrangling, but McDonald was able to catch the runaway reptile. Once the alligator came out from the weeds — struggling a bit with the rope and not very happy about the turn of events — McDonald was able to pick it up.

“It was only about a 4-foot alligator,” he estimated. “It got loose from a residence nearby.”

Again, relying on Discovery Channel knowledge — who says you can’t learn anything from television? — McDonald taped the alligator’s mouth shut and secured its legs so it wasn’t injured while trying to escape.

Once they had it “in custody,” the question became, What next?

“Technically, the Fish and Game Commission in Pennsylvania doesn’t deal with those,” McDonald said. “We even called the SPCA.”

Turns out they don’t deal with alligators, either.

One of the neighbors knew which home it escaped from, and police and the neighbors were able to get it back in its cage.

“It was interesting,” McDonald said with a laugh, adding he’s had plenty of interesting calls in his time as a police officer, but this was a first.

He didn’t think the alligator had been out of the pen for long, because it wasn’t far from home.

Laughing off praise for his prowess as an alligator wrestler, McDonald said he thinks he needs to ask Foster Township Police Chief Tom Munn for some more specific training.

“We’re definitely going to have to talk about it,” he said, laughing.

“Just another day in Foster Township.”