Add one more rescue to Officer Kyle Finney's resume. Last year, he pulled an 84-year-old woman from her burning car after an accident. Yesterday morning, he wrangled an alligator from Horseshoe Pond before the cold weather could get to it.

Okay, maybe not wrangled. But it took Finney a few tries with gloves and a net to get the 2-foot reptile into a cooler and inside his cruiser early yesterday morning.

"He's fairly calm as long as you keep your fingers away from his business end,"Finney said. "But he didn't want to come out of the pond."

The alligator, likely someone's abandoned pet, was first spotted Saturday by a Beacon Street couple walking their dog near Horseshoe Pond. Finney, who works the midnight shift, was off duty when the couple notified the Concord police. But when he returned to work this week, he made the pond part of his regular patrol.

And by the time most people read about the loose alligator in yesterday's Monitor, it and Finney were already posing for photos together.

"I knew the colder weather was coming and that he wasn't going to survive out there," said Finney, 27 and a Concord native who joined the police department five years ago. In addition, Finney didn't want an unsuspecting angler or passer-by tangling with the alligator.

Finney and two other officers, Christopher Gallagher and Robert Buelte, hit the pond a few times during their midnight shifts Monday. Around 3:30 a.m. yesterday, they spotted the reptile several feet offshore. They tried using a dog catcher's pole, with an adjustable noose at the end, to reach the alligator. When that didn't work, Finney headed to Wal-Mart to buy a net.

Around 5:30 a.m., Finney and Gallagher returned. Finney got close enough to net the gator and get it into a large cooler he'd brought for transport. Word is that photos taken just after capture have been widely circulated around the department. (And if the reaction outside the department is any indication, the photo of Finney and the gator looking like best pals will be widely circulated everywhere.)

The alligator has temporarily moved in with Finney, who just happened to have an empty 250 gallon tank at home. (It held saltwater fish until recently.) Yesterday, Finney divided his waking hours between researching alligators (they like fish, small insects and chicken) and shopping at the pet store. Horseshoe Pond has nothing on the heated tank Finney set up for the gator yesterday.

Finney knows the gator can grow to between 6 and 14 feet, depending on its gender. But Finney is willing to let this one's gender remain a mystery. "The only way I was going to find out that. . . . I didn't want to find out that bad," he said.

Finney will put the alligator up for adoption, maybe to a rescue agency, but definitely not to an individual, even though he thinks alligators are legal to own in New Hampshire. But he's putting the adoption off for at least a couple of days.

"He's quite the hit around here," Finney said from home yesterday.

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By ANNMARIE TIMMINS

Monitor staff