Florida’s Gator Hunters Swamped by Calls

Brian Wood is knee-deep in alligators, a beneficiary of the sudden statewide panic over a creature that has largely lived in peace with the humans who have increasingly invaded its habitat.

Wood’s business of skinning and boning the slaughtered beasts has tripled in the last two weeks as freaked-out Floridians have been striking back at the predators after three fatal attacks on women.

Alligator carcasses are stacked up like cordwood in the cold-storage unit of Wood’s processing plant, one of only eight in the Southeast that can dismember an alligator.

Though alligators are statistically less likely to kill a person than is the family dog, the state’s Nuisance Alligator Program hotline has had 200 calls a day since the three incidents in mid-May.

The state’s 38 contract trappers are being run ragged as local law enforcement officials dispatch them to catch and kill as many as 15 gators a day reported to be menacing humans and pets living near wetlands.

“I’m getting well over 100 complaints a week. I’m getting duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate calls on the same alligator. You’ve got people calling in from all sides of the lake or canal,” said Todd Hardwick, the trapper called out for nuisance kills in busy Miami-Dade County.

On Wednesday, a rare American crocodile got in on the action, crawling from a saltwater canal into a fenced backyard in the Cutler Ridge neighborhood. It took Hardwick and six others to harness the 11-foot beast which, due to its endangered status, had to be relocated to less-populated coastline.

While the fear-induced run is a boost for his business, Hardwick professes to be “the No. 1 fan of alligators” and worries some are being labeled nuisances -- and thus destined for destruction -- just for hanging around their own watery habitat. There are more than 1 million alligators in Florida, found in every one of its 67 counties.

Most worrisome, in the view of wildlife biologists and those charged with public safety, has been the spate of gun owners reaching for their pistols instead of the telephone.

“These are very primitive animals with very small brains, very thick skulls and very tough hides,” Hardwick said. “The chances of someone being able to render one dead is slim.”

Even veteran hunters such as Wood know the perils of projectiles bouncing off the gators’ hard heads.

“If you hit the skull, I’ve had experience of it ricocheting into the top of my arm. They can move at the last second,” said Wood of a coup de grace gone wrong.

Firearms are prohibited when hunting alligators during the fall season, as well as in trapping nuisance alligators year-round. Instead, those who kill gators for a living or for sport are armed with a harpoon and spring-loaded “bang stick” that looks more like a pool cue than a fighting chance against a fleet predator that can weigh up to 1,000 pounds.

The hunter first fires the harpoon to stun and tether the target, then approaches close enough to jab the bang stick’s tip into the base of the gator’s skull, pushing a .44-magnum cartridge back onto a firing pin that drives the bullet into the brain and -- hopefully -- immobilizes the animal so the hunter can sever its spinal cord with a knife.

After at least three incidents in recent days in which citizens used their guns against gators, officials with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have reminded weapons owners that it is illegal to shoot at alligators or to kill them by any means without a permit unless their own lives are in immediate danger.

“In order to kill an alligator with a bang stick, you have to be very precise where you hit. The brain is the size of a walnut -- it’s a very small target,” said Steve Stiegler, a wildlife biologist with the commission. “Even alligators that presumably have been killed have been known to have the potential to strike back and injure a person.”

If callers are not in immediate danger, the commission steers them to the section of its website called Living With Alligators, which offers advice on avoiding human-alligator conflict. The tips include staying out of the water during gators’ dusk-to-dawn food forays, keeping a reasonable distance and never feeding an alligator -- that trains the predators to associate eating with people.

Alligator panic was set off by the May 9 killing of a 28-year-old jogger, a May 14 fatal attack on a woman snorkeling in Lake George north of Orlando and the discovery of a third apparent victim in a drainage canal north of St. Petersburg that same day.

Although alligators can adapt to any wetland environment, once one is reported as a nuisance it is killed rather than relocated because alligators have a powerful homing instinct and will return to where they were captured, Hardwick said.

The three women’s deaths have reinvigorated a long-running debate over development in this state with an economy and a population that are both booming.

Florida is home to some of the fastest-growing areas in the country, including the already densely populated counties surrounding Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Naples, where subdivisions sprawl to the Everglades’ boundaries.

“The problem is that big alligators and urbanization don’t go hand in hand,” said Hardwick, who owns Pesky Critters removal service and, until recently, made more money catching possums and raccoons than alligators. “You can’t tell a mother that an 11-foot alligator lying on her beach isn’t a concern.”

In the 58 years that government researchers have kept statistics on alligator attacks on humans, they’ve recorded 351, of which 20 were fatal.

Despite a state law making it illegal to feed alligators, airboat tour operators in the Everglades toss marshmallows or popcorn to encourage the reptiles to show up at a particular site for the amusement of their customers. Most of the 40 registered alligator farms that breed the reptiles for their hides and meat also open their doors to paying visitors. Alligator handlers are even available for birthday party demonstrations.

With 18 million residents and 75 million visitors a year, Florida is the scene of millions of alligator interactions every year, and only a tiny fraction of those have been negative, notes University of Florida zoology professor Kent Vliet.

“People have a fairly instinctual and primal reaction to large reptiles dragging them into the water. But really, we have to keep this in perspective,” said Vliet, pointing out that more people are killed by lightning strikes than get attacked by alligators.

Florida’s alligator hunting season has been expanded this year from five weeks to 11 and the permit process eased to ensure that all 4,000 alligators designated for “harvest” are actually taken. This year’s expansion was decided months before the fatal attacks, and hunters predict an even broader population-control effort next year.

Noting that alligators are capable of living in high density, Vliet said Florida wetlands could sustain many times the number of alligators already in existence, “but people aren’t going to be comfortable with 5 million alligators around them.”

Although people living near lakes and canals have shown themselves more wary of alligators in the wake of the killings, the beasts continue to draw those intent on flirting with danger.

Wood, who has worked for 18 years as a guide and all-inclusive hunt organizer as well as a processor, said adventure sports fans already are calling from around the country to book his services for the Aug. 15 to Nov. 1 season.

Amateur thrill-seekers also are game.

“Our business hasn’t been affected by it. They’re still coming,” Chris Fernandez, who works at the Cooperstown airboat tour company, said of gator-seeking tourists.

Guides point out during the tours how fast alligators can swim, run and jump, and caution passengers who accept cotton balls to use as ear protection to be careful not to let the gators mistake the white wads for the marshmallows they feed them.

Those who know the complicated love-hate relationship between man and alligator predict the current panic will subside as tourists arrive for their summer vacations, as long as no one else is attacked.

But writer Carl Hiassen, who has gained fame and fortune lampooning fellow Floridians in his quirky crime novels, observed in his weekly column in the Miami Herald: “It will be a miracle if we get through the next few weeks without some half-wit shooting himself, his truck or his drinking buddy instead of the alligator at which he’s aiming.”