A Most Patient Predator
~
North Carolina's Resurgent Alligator
First published in the July/August 2014 issue of
Wildlife in North Carolina magazine
~
North Carolina's Resurgent Alligator
First published in the July/August 2014 issue of
Wildlife in North Carolina magazine
The young Acrocanthosaurus crept up to the thicket and paused. Crouched down low over his mighty thighs, the row of webbed neural spikes running from his neck to upper tail laid carefully flat along his spine, the monster peered with caution through the cycads and gingkoes that screened his movements from the pair of Tenontosaurus energetically browsing ferns on the far side of the marsh. They were slowly drawing nearer, absorbed in their appetites. The predator flexed his huge clawed toes in the mud and blinked at the biting insects swarming about his four-foot long head. He felt a ticklish sensation and glanced down at the curious animal like an outsized worm with scales that undulated gracefully across his enormous instep. He gritted his awesome teeth. The legless wonders seemed to get more common every day, along with those furry little whiskered creatures that hopped about in the trees and lived in holes in the ground. Pathetic.
Killing time was nigh, the 20-foot herbivores edging closer through the dense vegetation, rearing up on their succulent hind legs to blithely strip overhanging branches of leaves, then dropping again to all fours with a muddy splat as they gradually circumnavigated the marsh. Birds whistled and clattered in the treetops. Fishes plashed about the dead flowers floating in the bog. The Acrocanthosaurus took a long slow breath and became perfectly still, a dark horizontal mass 32 feet long composed of five and a half tons of bone, nerve and muscle. His serrated teeth shone wetly in the dappled sunlight of evening.
Suddenly he heard a slapping scurry of running feet coming from the far side of the marsh and beheld a pack of 11-foot Deinonychus, despicably gaudy in their plumage and waving their pointless little wings in excitement, emerging from a grove of fern trees. Clearly these vermin were set on having his supper for their own; even as he watched the group of six fanned out in a semicircle, the sickles of their admittedly effective hallux claws poised to slash, and rushed as one at the Tenontosaurus pair.
The leaf-eaters, properly panicked, came bounding frantically along the edge of the swamp and crashed headfirst into the hidden giant, which promptly seized the female by her lovely green neck and crushed the vertebrae to pulp. Her mate, providentially bringing up the rear, swerved sharply to avoid her killer and but was immediately swarmed by the birdlike butchers, who leapt onto his back and began whickering away with their terrible blades, slashing deep into the stricken animal’s neck and sides. Shrieking in anguish the remaining Tenontosaurus staggered through the thickets into deeper woods. Its final agonies were lost to the Acrocanthosaurus, by then noisily tearing open the chest cavity of its prey.
In less than an hour the female Tenontosaurus was reduced to a stripped and mangled framework, her entrails and most of her musculature torn from her hot bones and the remains sinking slowly into the mire. Blood dripped sadly from the surrounding conifers. Only titanic three-toed prints, gently filling with water, remained of the sated Acrocanthosaurus.
The ghostly sun sank to the whoops and bellows of North America’s tropical eastern coast. A pterosaur soared silently eastward into the gathering darkness, its vast span spooking a flock of sandpipers into startled flight. The pack of Deinonychus, fed and frolicsome, now returned and waded out into the swamp to rinse the blood from their chestnut feathers, chattering raucously and feinting at one another in mock attack. By the dying light a low and limber form gradually revealed itself in the water: one moment it was a sunken log, the next it had sprouted eyes. With barely perceptible motion it drifted toward the bipeds, oblivious in the noisy exultation of their successful hunt.
A pretty female, her dripping plumage glowing in the soft light of the rising moon, was following her band back to shore when suddenly an awful vice clamped around the base of her six-foot pinioned tail, cracking a few of the bones and jerking her off her feet and underwater. She arose in a fountain of spray, squealing horribly and flapping her forelimbs in the muddy foam in a desperate attempt to gain traction against the force dragging her away from land. Her packmates lined the bank, screeching in frustrated rage and fear as she was steadily pulled out to deeper water. When she reached the center of the marsh she gave a final stifled scream, smothered as she was yanked under. Bubbling froth jetted up from the depths, then it grew still. Wavelets caressed the surface, following the trail of torn dinosaur feathers to the shore.
Though somewhat clever, and sometimes disconcertingly huge, these warm-blooded types were easy pickings if you just took your time…
_____
Ancestors of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) have prowled the planet’s warm wetlands for 200 million years, since the early Jurassic, and have seen the great dinosaurs come and go and observed the evolution of flowers and the ascendancy of mammals, all the while retaining their winning combination of elongated bodies, long flattened snouts, formidable jaws and aquatic lifestyles. Like a group of small theropod dinosaurs that had put their feathering to good use by learning to fly, alligators had been among those blessed species to survive the long millennial night that followed the meteor’s impact 65 million years ago and that extinguished 75 percent of life on Earth. Slow and assured, its methods have prevailed against colossal odds, and in our own time and place the alligator is steadily regaining lost ground.
The crocodilians are a successful group of large reptiles numbering 23 species gathered into three taxonomic families: the Alligatoridae (alligators and South American caimans), Crocodylidae (the true crocodiles), and Gavialidae (India’s narrow-snouted gharials). All are characterized by long bodies armored to varying degrees with thick scutes and scaling and a flattened or narrowed snout lined with the conical teeth of a generalist predator.
Look closely at an alligator drowsing in the sunshine (a privilege soon to be available throughout eastern North Carolina). The armored hide of an adult, seen up close, resembles nothing so much as an aerial view of a seamed and fissured landscape, cracked with aridity and lined with channels, gullies, mesas and buttes. The broad chunky head and snout are flat on top with only the eyes’ occipital ridges rising above the profile, ideal anatomy for impersonating floating logs in turbid water. The tiny black blisters that line the lips (if there were any lips) above the alligator's teeth are integumentary sense organs, delicate receptors that detect shifts in water pressure, allowing submerged gators to sense movement in the water column, such as passing fish, that their eyes might miss in the murky, tannic waters they prefer.
According to Robert Norville, Coastal Wildlife Biologist with the NC Division of Wildlife Management, alligators grow 3 to 4 inches per year in North Carolina, so a six-foot specimen is likely between 15 and 17 years old. After they reach four feet in length they are generally safe from predation except for other alligators and for that ultimate predator, man. 50 years is an average lifespan, during which time an alligator will have made significant contributions to its native ecosystem. A big male can go 14 feet and weigh a thousand pounds, and there are records of a giant over 17 feet taken in the Everglades. At the northern end of their range gators tend to be smaller, so Carolinians needn’t worry about stumbling upon Godzilla in the Roanoke River. This is due to the fact that more temperate areas have shorter growing periods for coldblooded animals like reptiles and amphibians, whereas semitropical regions like the Gulf coast have longer, warmer springs and summers and thus longer gator growing seasons.
One factor that may be aiding the alligator’s reclamation of its native land is that hoary boogieman, climate change. With the world’s temperatures ticking progressively upward and glaciers sloughing off into a rising sea, those more northerly coastal and lowland areas with adequate habitat spared our destructive attention are increasingly receptive to hosting these huge reptiles. America’s alligators are more resistant to cooler temperatures than any of their kin and thus have always had the capacity to settle more temperate environments than their heat-loving cousin the American crocodile, currently limited in the US to a slowly recovering population centered around Florida’s Cape Sable. On the other hand crocodiles are a much more cosmopolitan family of Order Crocodilia, boasting 13 species spread from the Amazon to the Nile to New Guinea; the only other alligator in the world is the critically endangered Chinese version.
Another beneficial feature of the alligator’s lifestyle is its gluttonous rapacity for nearly anything it can swallow. Fish, frogs, turtles, muskrats, cranes, smaller gators, snakes, cormorants, deer, hogs, dogs, carrion … anything that is capable of being caught, dragged and drowned is fair game to this apex predator. The alligator’s famous jaws exert tremendous downward force; in 2002 researchers at Florida State recorded a biting strength of 2,125 pounds from a 12-foot adult, similar to the impact of a smallish pickup truck landing on your foot. The alligator depends upon these incredible chompers to kill its prey quickly and decisively – it has no other weaponry and flailing hoofs or claws could easily damage an eye. The conical teeth are pretty much useless for tearing or chewing so most prey is simply gulped down whole, and if larger animals are successfully taken their corpses are stashed beneath a handy underwater log or tangle of roots to marinate until decomposition renders the flesh satisfactorily tender enough to tear into bite-sized gobs.
Breeding season begins in the spring, with males thundering their booming subsonic roars to lure mates and warn away rivals. Raising their heads and tails above the surface, the bull gators emit a deep primal snarl that carries like a lion’s growl and causes the water over their backs to dance about in panicky sprinkles. But we are only privy to a small portion of the performance. Like whales and elephants, as well as volcanoes, earthquakes and avalanches, alligators generate long sound waves called infrasound that can penetrate huge bodies of water, forests, and even solid rock. To us infrasound is more felt than heard, and perhaps because of its elemental provenance it has been observed to cause feelings of sublime unease in humans.
The female constructs the nest of leaves, sticks and mud in a heap by the water. She lays 20 to 50 white eggs and covers them with rotting vegetation; the bacterial metabolism of the continued decay keeps the eggs warm. This heating system is central to the brood’s eventual outcome because the specific incubation temperature determines the sex of the young gators: eggs hatched in the lower 90s Fahrenheit become males while those hatched in the lower 80s are females. The genders vary at middle temperatures. The mother remains near the nest throughout the two-month incubation period and, as with bears and humans, God’s mercy on you if you’re foolhardy enough to get between her and her offspring.
When the pretty brown-and-yellow banded young begin to hatch, tearing open their leathery natal chambers with the help of a temporary “egg tooth,” the mother digs them out of the nest and carries them in her mouth to nearby water, where they immediately begin hunting small fish, insects, crayfish, salamanders and frogs. The eight to ten-inch young give a high-pitched piping alarm when threatened which brings the mother running (alligators can run 11 miles per hour for short bursts), a maternal instinct generally unknown among other reptiles but common to crocodilians and birds and thus presumably also to dinosaurs.
Alligators are adaptable animals and can comfortably inhabit about any undeveloped area amply saturated: swamps, pocosins, rivers, ponds, lakes, sawgrass marshes, bays … all are equally attractive provided there is copious prey available. Some wetland areas lacking in sufficiently deep water are deliberately modified by gators, which use their claws and jaws to tear chunks of soft marl from a central location and pile it up in heaps around the sides. Rainfall and flooding soon fill it with fresh water and over time fish, frogs, salamanders and other locals happily colonize the “alligator hole.” Mink and herons fish in it; deer, raccoons, and bears rely upon it during the dry season. In this manner alligators resemble elephants and beavers (and humans) in their capacity for altering the natural landscape to fit their needs.
Despite the intermittent tabloid hysteria about alligator attacks (and why is it that a predator’s occasional killing and eating (“harvesting”) of a human triggers such alarums, when we think nothing of killing a great white shark or African lion, much rarer and arguably more interesting species than ours?), alligators are a generally peaceful lot, content to float quietly in their boggy world awaiting a passing carp or nutria. Louisiana and Florida, in particular, having brought their alligator populations fully back from the brink and have instituted sustainable hunting seasons, but the North Carolina population remains fragile and is protected from harassment, harm or killing by the federal Endangered Species Act, under which it is listed as Threatened.
_____
The present writer killed an alligator once, long ago in Terrebonne Parrish, Louisiana, and I can testify that this particular gator hunt, at least, was almost entirely lacking in excitement or sportsmanship. Embarking at dawn in a pirogue with my father and a couple of Cajuns whose English was virtually unintelligible we patrolled the swamp checking the bank lines that had been set the evening before. These heavy ropes, anchored to tree trunks, were suspended six inches above the black water a few feet from shore. A heavy-gauge hook hung there, baited with a rotting chunk of chicken or pork. Most of the baits we checked remained intact, but several lines were down and either submerged in the water or hidden in the undergrowth lining the bank.
We found one rope leading behind a tangle of thicket and a local and myself started hauling on it. It felt like we’d lassoed a wild boar. Shortly a bucking alligator, around four feet long, was hauled up to the boat, spraying us with water and snapping pointed teeth distinctly ill-suited for cutting rope. Sometime in the night, generally the alligator’s preferred time to hunt, it had lifted its head from the water and taken the bait; the rope was long enough to let the unsuspecting animal swim off a ways and swallow the baited hook, which then lodged in its throat. The alligator had spent the rest of the night exhausting itself in a desperate attempt to be rid of it, writhing underwater, on the surface, and in the muck along the bank, where crushed vegetation slathered with mud testified to its struggle. The pain must have been excruciating.
Now we had dragged it to the side of the pirogue and I was handed a simple open-sighted .22 rifle. One shot between the eyes and its agony was finished. We carried it and the two others killed that morning to a commercial processing facility and watched them being skinned and butchered by people whose ancestors had for centuries relied upon the largess of their natural environment for survival. I can’t say that I enjoyed my “hunt” (this was a rare instance where the deliberately misleading euphemism “harvest” was truly applicable), but Louisiana’s alligator population is doing fine, and while I wish the horrific pain inflicted on the animals could somehow be mitigated, it was unforgettable to see the merry Cajuns go about their bloody business with the insouciant capability that characterizes that culture.
_____
The American alligator is returning to its ancient home in the Carolinian lowlands step by stealthy step, and we should join the animal and plant communities that it coevolved with in welcoming the comeback of such a splendid beast. One day, perhaps millennia from now, perhaps nearer than we’d care to know, we too will have departed this earth as have 99.9 percent of all creatures that ever lived. One thing that seems likely is that the alligator, that supreme survivor of the age of the dinosaurs, will be among those carrying on without us.
Killing time was nigh, the 20-foot herbivores edging closer through the dense vegetation, rearing up on their succulent hind legs to blithely strip overhanging branches of leaves, then dropping again to all fours with a muddy splat as they gradually circumnavigated the marsh. Birds whistled and clattered in the treetops. Fishes plashed about the dead flowers floating in the bog. The Acrocanthosaurus took a long slow breath and became perfectly still, a dark horizontal mass 32 feet long composed of five and a half tons of bone, nerve and muscle. His serrated teeth shone wetly in the dappled sunlight of evening.
Suddenly he heard a slapping scurry of running feet coming from the far side of the marsh and beheld a pack of 11-foot Deinonychus, despicably gaudy in their plumage and waving their pointless little wings in excitement, emerging from a grove of fern trees. Clearly these vermin were set on having his supper for their own; even as he watched the group of six fanned out in a semicircle, the sickles of their admittedly effective hallux claws poised to slash, and rushed as one at the Tenontosaurus pair.
The leaf-eaters, properly panicked, came bounding frantically along the edge of the swamp and crashed headfirst into the hidden giant, which promptly seized the female by her lovely green neck and crushed the vertebrae to pulp. Her mate, providentially bringing up the rear, swerved sharply to avoid her killer and but was immediately swarmed by the birdlike butchers, who leapt onto his back and began whickering away with their terrible blades, slashing deep into the stricken animal’s neck and sides. Shrieking in anguish the remaining Tenontosaurus staggered through the thickets into deeper woods. Its final agonies were lost to the Acrocanthosaurus, by then noisily tearing open the chest cavity of its prey.
In less than an hour the female Tenontosaurus was reduced to a stripped and mangled framework, her entrails and most of her musculature torn from her hot bones and the remains sinking slowly into the mire. Blood dripped sadly from the surrounding conifers. Only titanic three-toed prints, gently filling with water, remained of the sated Acrocanthosaurus.
The ghostly sun sank to the whoops and bellows of North America’s tropical eastern coast. A pterosaur soared silently eastward into the gathering darkness, its vast span spooking a flock of sandpipers into startled flight. The pack of Deinonychus, fed and frolicsome, now returned and waded out into the swamp to rinse the blood from their chestnut feathers, chattering raucously and feinting at one another in mock attack. By the dying light a low and limber form gradually revealed itself in the water: one moment it was a sunken log, the next it had sprouted eyes. With barely perceptible motion it drifted toward the bipeds, oblivious in the noisy exultation of their successful hunt.
A pretty female, her dripping plumage glowing in the soft light of the rising moon, was following her band back to shore when suddenly an awful vice clamped around the base of her six-foot pinioned tail, cracking a few of the bones and jerking her off her feet and underwater. She arose in a fountain of spray, squealing horribly and flapping her forelimbs in the muddy foam in a desperate attempt to gain traction against the force dragging her away from land. Her packmates lined the bank, screeching in frustrated rage and fear as she was steadily pulled out to deeper water. When she reached the center of the marsh she gave a final stifled scream, smothered as she was yanked under. Bubbling froth jetted up from the depths, then it grew still. Wavelets caressed the surface, following the trail of torn dinosaur feathers to the shore.
Though somewhat clever, and sometimes disconcertingly huge, these warm-blooded types were easy pickings if you just took your time…
_____
Ancestors of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) have prowled the planet’s warm wetlands for 200 million years, since the early Jurassic, and have seen the great dinosaurs come and go and observed the evolution of flowers and the ascendancy of mammals, all the while retaining their winning combination of elongated bodies, long flattened snouts, formidable jaws and aquatic lifestyles. Like a group of small theropod dinosaurs that had put their feathering to good use by learning to fly, alligators had been among those blessed species to survive the long millennial night that followed the meteor’s impact 65 million years ago and that extinguished 75 percent of life on Earth. Slow and assured, its methods have prevailed against colossal odds, and in our own time and place the alligator is steadily regaining lost ground.
The crocodilians are a successful group of large reptiles numbering 23 species gathered into three taxonomic families: the Alligatoridae (alligators and South American caimans), Crocodylidae (the true crocodiles), and Gavialidae (India’s narrow-snouted gharials). All are characterized by long bodies armored to varying degrees with thick scutes and scaling and a flattened or narrowed snout lined with the conical teeth of a generalist predator.
Look closely at an alligator drowsing in the sunshine (a privilege soon to be available throughout eastern North Carolina). The armored hide of an adult, seen up close, resembles nothing so much as an aerial view of a seamed and fissured landscape, cracked with aridity and lined with channels, gullies, mesas and buttes. The broad chunky head and snout are flat on top with only the eyes’ occipital ridges rising above the profile, ideal anatomy for impersonating floating logs in turbid water. The tiny black blisters that line the lips (if there were any lips) above the alligator's teeth are integumentary sense organs, delicate receptors that detect shifts in water pressure, allowing submerged gators to sense movement in the water column, such as passing fish, that their eyes might miss in the murky, tannic waters they prefer.
According to Robert Norville, Coastal Wildlife Biologist with the NC Division of Wildlife Management, alligators grow 3 to 4 inches per year in North Carolina, so a six-foot specimen is likely between 15 and 17 years old. After they reach four feet in length they are generally safe from predation except for other alligators and for that ultimate predator, man. 50 years is an average lifespan, during which time an alligator will have made significant contributions to its native ecosystem. A big male can go 14 feet and weigh a thousand pounds, and there are records of a giant over 17 feet taken in the Everglades. At the northern end of their range gators tend to be smaller, so Carolinians needn’t worry about stumbling upon Godzilla in the Roanoke River. This is due to the fact that more temperate areas have shorter growing periods for coldblooded animals like reptiles and amphibians, whereas semitropical regions like the Gulf coast have longer, warmer springs and summers and thus longer gator growing seasons.
One factor that may be aiding the alligator’s reclamation of its native land is that hoary boogieman, climate change. With the world’s temperatures ticking progressively upward and glaciers sloughing off into a rising sea, those more northerly coastal and lowland areas with adequate habitat spared our destructive attention are increasingly receptive to hosting these huge reptiles. America’s alligators are more resistant to cooler temperatures than any of their kin and thus have always had the capacity to settle more temperate environments than their heat-loving cousin the American crocodile, currently limited in the US to a slowly recovering population centered around Florida’s Cape Sable. On the other hand crocodiles are a much more cosmopolitan family of Order Crocodilia, boasting 13 species spread from the Amazon to the Nile to New Guinea; the only other alligator in the world is the critically endangered Chinese version.
Another beneficial feature of the alligator’s lifestyle is its gluttonous rapacity for nearly anything it can swallow. Fish, frogs, turtles, muskrats, cranes, smaller gators, snakes, cormorants, deer, hogs, dogs, carrion … anything that is capable of being caught, dragged and drowned is fair game to this apex predator. The alligator’s famous jaws exert tremendous downward force; in 2002 researchers at Florida State recorded a biting strength of 2,125 pounds from a 12-foot adult, similar to the impact of a smallish pickup truck landing on your foot. The alligator depends upon these incredible chompers to kill its prey quickly and decisively – it has no other weaponry and flailing hoofs or claws could easily damage an eye. The conical teeth are pretty much useless for tearing or chewing so most prey is simply gulped down whole, and if larger animals are successfully taken their corpses are stashed beneath a handy underwater log or tangle of roots to marinate until decomposition renders the flesh satisfactorily tender enough to tear into bite-sized gobs.
Breeding season begins in the spring, with males thundering their booming subsonic roars to lure mates and warn away rivals. Raising their heads and tails above the surface, the bull gators emit a deep primal snarl that carries like a lion’s growl and causes the water over their backs to dance about in panicky sprinkles. But we are only privy to a small portion of the performance. Like whales and elephants, as well as volcanoes, earthquakes and avalanches, alligators generate long sound waves called infrasound that can penetrate huge bodies of water, forests, and even solid rock. To us infrasound is more felt than heard, and perhaps because of its elemental provenance it has been observed to cause feelings of sublime unease in humans.
The female constructs the nest of leaves, sticks and mud in a heap by the water. She lays 20 to 50 white eggs and covers them with rotting vegetation; the bacterial metabolism of the continued decay keeps the eggs warm. This heating system is central to the brood’s eventual outcome because the specific incubation temperature determines the sex of the young gators: eggs hatched in the lower 90s Fahrenheit become males while those hatched in the lower 80s are females. The genders vary at middle temperatures. The mother remains near the nest throughout the two-month incubation period and, as with bears and humans, God’s mercy on you if you’re foolhardy enough to get between her and her offspring.
When the pretty brown-and-yellow banded young begin to hatch, tearing open their leathery natal chambers with the help of a temporary “egg tooth,” the mother digs them out of the nest and carries them in her mouth to nearby water, where they immediately begin hunting small fish, insects, crayfish, salamanders and frogs. The eight to ten-inch young give a high-pitched piping alarm when threatened which brings the mother running (alligators can run 11 miles per hour for short bursts), a maternal instinct generally unknown among other reptiles but common to crocodilians and birds and thus presumably also to dinosaurs.
Alligators are adaptable animals and can comfortably inhabit about any undeveloped area amply saturated: swamps, pocosins, rivers, ponds, lakes, sawgrass marshes, bays … all are equally attractive provided there is copious prey available. Some wetland areas lacking in sufficiently deep water are deliberately modified by gators, which use their claws and jaws to tear chunks of soft marl from a central location and pile it up in heaps around the sides. Rainfall and flooding soon fill it with fresh water and over time fish, frogs, salamanders and other locals happily colonize the “alligator hole.” Mink and herons fish in it; deer, raccoons, and bears rely upon it during the dry season. In this manner alligators resemble elephants and beavers (and humans) in their capacity for altering the natural landscape to fit their needs.
Despite the intermittent tabloid hysteria about alligator attacks (and why is it that a predator’s occasional killing and eating (“harvesting”) of a human triggers such alarums, when we think nothing of killing a great white shark or African lion, much rarer and arguably more interesting species than ours?), alligators are a generally peaceful lot, content to float quietly in their boggy world awaiting a passing carp or nutria. Louisiana and Florida, in particular, having brought their alligator populations fully back from the brink and have instituted sustainable hunting seasons, but the North Carolina population remains fragile and is protected from harassment, harm or killing by the federal Endangered Species Act, under which it is listed as Threatened.
_____
The present writer killed an alligator once, long ago in Terrebonne Parrish, Louisiana, and I can testify that this particular gator hunt, at least, was almost entirely lacking in excitement or sportsmanship. Embarking at dawn in a pirogue with my father and a couple of Cajuns whose English was virtually unintelligible we patrolled the swamp checking the bank lines that had been set the evening before. These heavy ropes, anchored to tree trunks, were suspended six inches above the black water a few feet from shore. A heavy-gauge hook hung there, baited with a rotting chunk of chicken or pork. Most of the baits we checked remained intact, but several lines were down and either submerged in the water or hidden in the undergrowth lining the bank.
We found one rope leading behind a tangle of thicket and a local and myself started hauling on it. It felt like we’d lassoed a wild boar. Shortly a bucking alligator, around four feet long, was hauled up to the boat, spraying us with water and snapping pointed teeth distinctly ill-suited for cutting rope. Sometime in the night, generally the alligator’s preferred time to hunt, it had lifted its head from the water and taken the bait; the rope was long enough to let the unsuspecting animal swim off a ways and swallow the baited hook, which then lodged in its throat. The alligator had spent the rest of the night exhausting itself in a desperate attempt to be rid of it, writhing underwater, on the surface, and in the muck along the bank, where crushed vegetation slathered with mud testified to its struggle. The pain must have been excruciating.
Now we had dragged it to the side of the pirogue and I was handed a simple open-sighted .22 rifle. One shot between the eyes and its agony was finished. We carried it and the two others killed that morning to a commercial processing facility and watched them being skinned and butchered by people whose ancestors had for centuries relied upon the largess of their natural environment for survival. I can’t say that I enjoyed my “hunt” (this was a rare instance where the deliberately misleading euphemism “harvest” was truly applicable), but Louisiana’s alligator population is doing fine, and while I wish the horrific pain inflicted on the animals could somehow be mitigated, it was unforgettable to see the merry Cajuns go about their bloody business with the insouciant capability that characterizes that culture.
_____
The American alligator is returning to its ancient home in the Carolinian lowlands step by stealthy step, and we should join the animal and plant communities that it coevolved with in welcoming the comeback of such a splendid beast. One day, perhaps millennia from now, perhaps nearer than we’d care to know, we too will have departed this earth as have 99.9 percent of all creatures that ever lived. One thing that seems likely is that the alligator, that supreme survivor of the age of the dinosaurs, will be among those carrying on without us.
