SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) 20 August 06 How does an alligator go from pond to purse? (Jamie Malernee)
The hunters slice through the morning silence on Lake Okeechobee, airboats whining as a helicopter follows in the distance, black insect on a pink sky.
The chopper thunders closer, then zooms past. The lookout in the cockpit radios down directions. He's spotted an alligator nest in the marsh.
Tracy Howell revs his airboat engine and charges into the swirling blades of grass and giant cane. He and his hunting partner then leap off, trudging through the muck. Their only weapon: a plastic canoe paddle covered with the bite marks of angry mother alligators. The females fight to protect what the hunters are after.
Alligator eggs.
The brush parts to reveal a large nest. The mama? Nowhere to be seen, though that doesn't mean she isn't close, lurking in a mud cave only feet away.
"I'd rather the female be present and aggressive, so you know where they are," says a wary Howell. He is an alligator farmer and the leader of this egg hunt, overseen by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Earlier, another hunting party stumbled into a 10-footer. She lunged, broke their stick and they had to retreat. Howell and his partner collect the eggs with pounding hearts and gentle hands.
Then they hurry back to the airboat, speeding off to safety with their stolen treasure.
It starts with an egg
Gucci. Hermes. Prada.
Pick up one of their designer alligator purses, and chances are that pricey bit of European-crafted elegance started life closer to home as an oval egg.
Florida is one of the largest suppliers of alligator hides to the world, second only to Louisiana. After more than a decade of hardship, business is booming; the value of skins doubled since 1993. Louisiana's misfortune -- alligator habitat damage from last year's hurricanes -- is expected to boost prices and Florida's importance in the global, $600 million-a-year industry.
Every year, tens of thousands of alligator eggs are methodically -- and under state supervision, legally -- collected from the Florida wild, then hatched and raised on farms, where they mature in dark, warm buildings, growing at twice their natural rate. Then they are slaughtered, their meat sold to restaurants, their hides sent to a tannery and turned into any number of items, from a simple wallet to a golf bag.
The slick stores that sell these products rarely hint at their rugged beginnings. It is a rough, strange journey from swamp to swank.
Down on the farm
The rumble of a tractor sounds a lot like a dinner bell to a pond full of hungry gators.
Dozens of the huge, 12-foot armored beasts speed toward the shore as a machine dumps fat and fish meal along the bank. The modern-day dinosaurs claw over each other, gulping down the food with a snap of their jaws.
Alligator farmer Paul Calcaterra Jr. smiles at his brood. He raises 8,000 alligators on this Okeechobee farm, buying most of his eggs from alligator farmers like Howell, who collect them each nesting season and sell them for about $10 each.
The state began allowing egg collection in 1987, two decades after alligators were deemed endangered, once their population rebounded. Today, there are more than a million in the wild.
About 45,000 eggs were collected this year, the most ever, netting the state about $225,000 in fees used to fund other alligator management programs.
Calcaterra has bought thousands of them because even his biggest alligators, like the ones feeding before him, don't breed well in captive conditions. Despite this failure, these "monsters" are still his favorites.
"If you give me enough beers, I'll pull one up and wrestle 'em," brags Calcaterra, 33, who grew up in Texas and never lost the state swagger.
To prove it, he rushes down into the feasting swarm on the bank. Most scatter as he playfully slaps one of the biggest on the top of the head, as if roughhousing with a favorite dog. He doesn't go after the ones in the water, though. He knows that's their territory.
"If I swam across the water right now, I wouldn't get 10 feet," he says, still grinning.
"They'd tear me up."
Life in the dark
Calcaterra farm is one of the largest in the state, spanning 168 acres and 12 buildings in Florida cattle and citrus country. A staff of three, including Calcaterra, oversees the entire operation.
A wet, moldy stench fills the first building, Nursery 1. About 5,600 eggs lie in boxes, incubating in heated rooms.
Some of the eggs have started hatching and the rest will continue through September. The babies chirp to get out, and Calcaterra helps them, thumping the eggshells with a knuckle.
The babies stay in this building for a year. The heat boosts the cold-blooded animals' metabolism and makes them eat more. They grow to 18 inches, about twice as long as 1-year-olds in the wild. After that, the reptiles are moved into different buildings as they mature.
Alligators are cannibals, so they are separated by size to keep the biggest ones from eating the smallest. This also cuts down competition over food.
Calcaterra opens the door to a grow-out house. Wild splashing echoes.
Each room is filled with about a foot of water and hundreds of tiny alligators. Frightened, they scurry to the corners. These alligators are kept in the dark -- in the wild, they feed at night -- to get them to eat more. Darkness also is thought to lower aggression and stress.
Calcaterra feeds them alligator chow, a product that looks like dog food but stinks of fish, every day or two. Every two days, he or another worker uses a pressurized hose and chlorine solution to disinfect the buildings.
By the time the alligators are 22 months old, they are 3.5 feet to 5 feet long. They get more spacious quarters with fewer roommates, about 50 per room, to reduce fighting.
A quick death
Only 240 large breeding alligators enjoy a long life (some are 40 years old) and the luxury of an open pond in the hope they will produce eggs. For the rest, leaving the grow-out houses means landing in the skinning room.
Killing is done swiftly, when the animals are about 2 years old, 5 feet long and 35 pounds. They meet their end via a .22-caliber rifle shell to the skull.
Calcaterra pulls the trigger. He says slaughtering alligators for their skins and meat is no different from killing cows for steaks and leather. He figures if they could, these gators would kill him right back.
"They don't like me, and I don't like them," he says with a shrug. "There is no such thing as a nice alligator."
After an alligator is killed, its body is usually left in a walk-in refrigerator overnight, so its blood and nerves settle. Also in these coolers are leftovers from previous slaughters.
Barrels of alligator feet wait to be made into backscratchers and key chains. Dismembered heads lie stacked until the day they are preserved and shellacked -- their eyes replaced with marble replicas -- and sold to tourists.
Calcaterra's skinner lifts the dead gators from the cooler onto metal tables, slicing through bone and flesh.
The meat is packed in boxes and shipped to local restaurants for $5 a pound. The skins are salted so they do not rot.
Calcaterra sends his skins to his father, Paul Calcaterra Sr., who makes cowboy boots in Texas. Most other farmers sell to a tannery, distributor or manufacturer.
When the market is flooded or when demand for luxury items is low, prices plummet. That's what happened in the early '90s, when the hide value, measured by the width of the belly, went from $5.40 a centimeter to $2.17.
To survive, many farmers turned their businesses into tourist attractions.
"There's somebody making a lot of money," Calcaterra says of the alligator product business, "and it's not the alligator farmer."
Large tanneries, which turn the raw skin into soft hide and are often owned by brands such as Gucci, have greater control over prices, says Harry J. Dutton, coordinator of the state's Alligator Management Program. There are so few of them, and they buy so many skins that they can negotiate lower prices and stockpile hides.
Despite this, prices have increased recently, thanks to rising consumer demand, particularly overseas. Farmers say they are getting $5 per belly centimeter and predict prices will keep rising, because of an expected shortage of eggs in hurricane-devastated Louisiana.
About an hour's drive northwest of Calcaterra's alligator farm is one of the last remaining U.S.-owned tanneries that processes alligator hides.
It is small, the only one in Florida. Most of the industry is now in Italy and France, where brand-name manufacturers have a reputation for producing the highest quality -- and the highest prices.
Dave Travers, 58, owner of Sebring Custom Tanning, is a survivor. The business left his father bankrupt and heartbroken. Still, Travers stays. His 85-year-old mother answers the phones.
"It's hard and it's labor-intensive," says Travers, whose staff of four processed 7,000 gator hides last year. "But there's something about taking an animal skin that stinks and turning it into something beautiful."
Descaled and then thrown into a vat of pickling acid, the alligator skins are next moved into huge spinning drums. The rough, greenish hides go soft and turn a pale blue.
Leave the skins in too long or in water too hot, and they dissolve into glue.
"Then you just go home and cry," said Travers.
After the drums, the skins are run through a machine that shaves them to a uniform thickness. Then it's back into drums for more chemicals that preserve and bleach the hides, preparing them for dyeing.
The most popular colors are black and brown, but Travers has had requests for hot pink, canary yellow, even peach. Once, he had a special order from a man.
"He said, `I'm a pimp, and I want purple!'" Travers recalls.
After dyeing, skins dry and a worker brushes on a glaze. As a final step, a machine polishes them to a glorious sheen.
The process takes about 12 weeks. Travers charges $15 a foot for tanning large gators or about $1.50 a belly centimeter for farm-grown ones. The best tanneries in Europe and Singapore can charge 20 times that.
"It makes no sense to me," he says with a sigh. "American women, if they see Italy or France on the tag and a brand name, they will spend literally thousands of dollars on a purse when they can get one here for hundreds. There's no difference."
Expensive luxury
It's not only women who are willing to pay thousands for alligator. In a warehouse off Dixie Highway in Fort Lauderdale, men shell out big bucks to have the skins put on their big toys.
Jeffrey Phipps of Jeffrey Phipps Custom Saddles uses alligator hides to make motorcycle seats for the vice president of Coach purses and the fiddle player for country singer Kenny Chesney. He has other requests from rapper Lil Jon and the Black Eyed Peas.
At this moment, he's busy sewing a large rush order for a motorcycle seat, saddlebag and tool bag, for which he'll charge $5,000.
"It's just the trend, because it's expensive and not everybody has it," Phipps says. "Why do the rappers drive the Bentleys and the Benzes? Because Joe Schmo can't afford it."
Five thousand dollars is cheap compared with the prices an hour's drive north at Giorgio's of Palm Beach, an exclusive shop on Worth Avenue. The store offers a dog carrier and leash in red alligator for $12,000, a chocolate-colored man's overcoat for $49,500, and an office furniture suite for $425,000.
Customers include Arnold Schwarzenegger, the owner of the Washington Redskins and the king of Malaysia, says store owner and designer George Sharoubim.
No one has yet to purchase his masterpiece: a caramel-colored Bosendorfer piano covered in the skins of 68 farm-raised gators.
Sharoubim doesn't play a note. "I just love to look at it," he says.
Price: $975,000.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/custom/consumer/sfl-gatorfarm20xaug20,1,2877115.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
