TIMES-PICAYUNE (New Orleans, Louisiana) 04 June 06 Gator Watch - Sightings of the reptiles have become daily occurrences in some St. Tammany neighborhoods. (Paul Rioux)
Armed with a .22-caliber rifle, Howard McCrea stood on the edge of a drainage canal near Slidell and scanned the water's surface, waiting for a large bull alligator to come up for air.
Having recently pulled four 10-foot-long gators from the same spot in the Schneider Canal, McCrea said it appears Hurricane Katrina's storm surge swept mature alligators into canals lining subdivisions along the Lake Pontchartrain shoreline.
"They rode the waves in here, and now they're trying to get back to wherever they came from," he said. "You can tell they're not used to humans because they're real jittery."
And the gators aren't the only ones who are nervous.
Many residents in the nearby Oak Harbor Estates subdivision said they are worried about the near-daily gator sightings in the canals behind their homes, especially after a spate of three fatal alligator attacks in Florida last month.
"My phone was ringing off the hook for three days after what happened in Florida," said McCrea, an animal control officer with the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office. "Every time someone saw something moving in the water, I got a call."
McCrea was summoned last week after yet another large alligator was spotted in the Schneider Canal near the pumping station at Oak Harbor Boulevard and U.S. 11.
About 15 minutes after he arrived, the gator poked its head out of the water and McCrea raised his rifle, firing a plastic stun bullet.
The shot missed, but the gator had given away its position, and McCrea quickly snared it with a three-pronged hook attached to a fishing rod with a 100-pound line.
And so began a 30-minute tug of war as the gator rolled and thrashed occasionally, turning the water dark brown with mud stirred from the canal bottom.
Wearing camouflage fatigues and an alligator-tooth necklace, McCrea eventually pulled the alligator to the edge of the canal with help from Slidell animal control officer Dave Bergmark, who hooked it with a second fishing line.
A small crowd of residents and construction workers snapped photos with cell-phone cameras as McCrea stepped into the water and slipped a rope noose over the gator's head.
"Oh, mother!" said Philomena Colton, who moved to the nearby Grand Champion subdivision from California in January. "I want to go back to San Diego!"
Colton and her husband recently installed an iron gate along the canal behind their home to protect their children and pets from an alligator attack.
"We're seeing alligators in the canal every day, sometimes twice a day," she said, noting that McCrea recently caught a 4-foot gator behind her neighbor's house. "We don't want what happened in Florida to happen here."
Colton had stopped to watch the spectacle while driving her children home from school. While 11-year-old Alex went up to take a closer look at the captured gator, 10-year-old Olivia kept her distance.
"I'm scared of crickets," she said. "If there's a bug in my room, I stand on the bed and scream for my mom and dad."
With help from several construction workers, McCrea pulled the 10-foot-3-inch gator onto a trailer next to a 9-footer he had captured two days earlier in Coin du Lestin Estates west of Slidell. He said both reptiles have a healthy fear of humans and would be released in a remote area of the Honey Island Swamp.
McCrea, who has captured as many as 250 nuisance alligators in previous years, declined to say how many he's rounded up this year.
"I don't want to tell you that because it gets the public nervous," he said. "It's not that the numbers are up that much, but the alligators are bigger. Instead of the normal 4- to 6-foot range, we're seeing more 8- to 10-footers."
St. Tammany isn't the only parish having trouble with gators lately.
In St. John the Baptist Parish, the Sheriff's Office has received at least 10 alligator reports in the past month. The spottings have been in the back yards of homes near small lakes and waterways in the LaPlace area.
During the past week alone, five complaints came in. Two of them were from homeowners along Oak Moss Drive in the Live Oak Landing area of the upscale Belle Terre residential complex.
"They're looking for mates or water -- I don't know," said Maj. Mike Tregre of the Sheriff's Office.
Or food. In one case, an Oak Moss Drive resident said two 5-foot-long alligators had killed her dog.
While pets occasionally fall victim to alligators, attacks on humans are extremely rare in Louisiana.
There are no official statistics, but a recent national study of gator attacks found documentation for just two attacks on people in the state since 1948.
Gators are more of a threat in Florida, which has recorded 334 attacks in the same time period, with 20 fatalities, including three women killed in separate attacks within a week last month.
Florida officials called the attacks coincidental, saying a recent drought may have forced gators into a more aggressive search for food.
After being hunted nearly to extinction, alligators were listed as an endangered species in 1973. Since then, the gator population has rebounded along the Gulf Coast, coinciding with a building boom that has placed vacation homes, retirement communities and golf resorts closer to alligator habitats.
The result has been an increase in human-meets-gator incidents.
McCrea said one reason such encounters have rarely turned violent in southeastern Louisiana is that, unlike in more heavily developed coastal areas in Florida, gators here have plenty of prey further down the food chain, such as nutria, turtles, snakes, crabs and fish.
"They're all fat and happy," he said. "They have no reason to look to people for food."
Problems occur, he said, when people bring food to the alligators. He said feeding alligators eliminates their natural fear of human beings and encourages them to venture farther into populated areas.
In 2003, the St. Tammany Parish Council passed an ordinance making it illegal to feed alligators within 500 feet of a residence.
The ordinance carries a penalty of a $500 fine and up to 90 days in jail upon conviction. But no one has been cited as sheriff's deputies have instead issued warnings in an attempt to educate the public.
"Most people stop feeding gators after you explain how dangerous it is," McCrea said. "They don't realize that they're putting people within a 50-mile radius at risk. That's the feeding range of a big bull alligator."
Illegal feeding of alligators has become a serious problem at the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in eastern New Orleans, said Byron Fortier, a park ranger with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
He said some roads in the refuge are littered with empty bags for bread, marshmallows and doughnuts that people have fed to alligators.
"People will feed them pretty much anything that's white and floats because the alligators can see it and they have to come up to the surface to get it," Fortier said. "It's really gotten out of control."
The feeding frenzy is blamed for dozens of reports of gators coming out of the water and approaching park visitors looking for handouts. No one has been attacked, but in a few cases the gators hissed or growled at visitors, said James Harris, a refuge biologist.
"People just don't realize how dangerous it is to feed alligators. One person told me, 'Oh, they get so tame that you can hand feed them,' " he said. "But they're not tame; they're wild animals that have lost their fear of humans. That's totally different."
Harris said park rangers recently killed five large alligators deemed to be aggressive. When possible, nuisance gators are trapped and released in remote areas of the refuge, but he said these gators had become too comfortable around people.
"By feeding alligators, we are becoming a source of food for them rather than a source of fear," he said. "We're putting ourselves back in the food chain, and we're not necessarily on top anymore."
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1149401989165140.xml&coll=1
