The Alligator Is Not a Man-Eater -- Unless, of Course, It's Feeling Hungry

My family's history with alligators goes way back. My grandfather and his cousins hatched one from an egg in 1879, when they were all children. His name was Anceps -- the alligator, not my grandfather -- and he was much-beloved as a pet until he was unwisely put out to sun in a tin dish one summer day and found later parboiled.

One of those young cousins, E.A. "Ned" McIlhenny, grew up to write "The Alligator's Life History," an immensely readable biological treatise so definitive the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles had it reprinted in 1976, more than 40 years after its original publication.

As a boy, he writes in the book's preface, he and his cousins used to swim in the bayou that surrounds Avery Island, and "always took great pleasure and not a little excitement in seeing how many gators we could call around us during our swim. We would attract them by imitating the barks and cries of dogs and by making loud popping noises with our lips. . . . We had no fear of them and would swim around the big fellows, dive under them and sometimes treat them with great disrespect. . . . Sometimes when the tide was low we would surround on three sides a big one that might be lying on a mud flat. . . . He would stand a certain amount of pelting with mud. . . . Then it was, 'Boys, get out of his way, he's going to the water.' On one of these occasions, I was mired past my knees in the soft mud . . . and the old gator who was blinded with mud ran over me as I fell backward, and I still have the marks of his claws on my stomach where . . . he slid over my naked body."

Uncle Ned gave me my first alligator as a pet when I was about 7. Croxy was an ill-tempered little beast, and returned all my love with repeated attempts at digital amputation. We eventually had to give him to a zoo.

He did not, however, diminish my affection for alligators -- an affection widely shared in Louisiana. Women in my extended family wear little gold and silver alligators as jewelry, a few have necklaces of mounted alligator teeth and one has written a little book of alligator verse. Alligator skulls abound as household decor.

Alligators have a surprisingly wide range, particularly during mating season, and fairly frequently one will wander into the the little lake where we swim on Avery Island, much to the alarm of Northern visitors. Almost all of them are small, however, and do no harm. I even caught one on a fly rod during the 1980s. He was about 2 1/2 feet long, and it took me 20 minutes to land him. The hardest part was getting him out of the hand net so we could turn him loose. He is now doubtless someone's handbag, wallet or belt.

In Uncle Ned's day, alligators lived as long as 50 years and grew as large as 18 feet and 500 pounds in the wild, but these days it's unusual to encounter one more than eight feet long and a fraction of that age. Hunting pressure in recent years has diminished the size but not the numbers. Sophisticated management of the gator population nowadays encourages hunters to rob alligator nests and transport the eggs to a hatchery, where they are exchanged for year-old hatchlings then turned loose in the wild. Alligators grow about a foot a year for at least the first six years, and most are shot for hides and meat sometime afterward. The egg exchange vastly reduces the mortality of baby gators from fish, birds and other natural predators and keeps the population healthy.

Once an alligator gets two or three feet long, its only enemy is man. Just last month, I boated into the marsh to inspect a natural alligator nursery aswarm with newly released youngsters still squeaking and wearing their yellow baby stripes. They eyed me hungrily. I did the same to them.