WCBD (Charleston, S Carolina) 12 February 08 Alligator Danger (Tara Lynn)
You may have one of these signs in your neighborhood…Warning. Alligators. Don't feed.
But think they aren't where you live????
Look what we found.
An alligator swimming outside a Bluffton apartment complex.
Or an alligator so well known - neighbors on John's Island called him Al.
Suzy Martin has one in her neighborhood pond in Hollywood.
“This one is smaller. He's probably under five feet around there.”
We went to Gator Getter Ron Russell to find out just how common these sights are.
“If you look at statistics of people moving into the area, there are more alligators. There's no doubt about that, but there's also more people and more people interacting with alligators,” Russell explained. He caught more then 80 gators last year as a part time catcher for the Department of Natural Resources.
By nature, alligators fear humans. They prefer cruising along in shallow fresh water at night, but you may also catch them sunning on the banks during the summer.
“You have to live by their rules when you live by an alligator. An alligator will eat a dog. It will eat a cat. But to them it's not your dog. It's not your cat. It's nothing personal. It's food to them,” said Russell.
So what do you do if you encounter an alligator in your neighborhood???
We sat in as Russell trained D-N-R officers how to catch nuisance alligators.
“The whole idea is to approach a gator from the front,” he demonstrated as he poked an alligator on its side. “See how the head sweeps and the tail sweeps, that's what they do. The tail sweeps the prey into their mouth.”
The number one rule when dealing with an alligator is not to feed it. A fed alligator can lose its fear of humans and can become a threat.
“A human next to the water, whether it be a baby or a small child they still associate that child with somebody feeding them and they come with that child and that's when the danger is going to happen.”
And as more developments pop up in the Lowcounty, Russell says alligators have no where else to go....but closer to you.
“If an alligator can move inland to a more secure pond in a neighborhood, he's going to do that because that's what he's trying to do. Survive,” Russell added.
“So is there a problem with aggressive alligators in the Lowcountry?” I asked him.
“As far as I'm concerned, none of them are aggressive.”
Conservationist and reptile rescuer Roark Ferguson estimates there are about 100,000 alligators in South Carolina, but there are no official counts…one reason he's concerned that lawmakers are proposing an alligator hunting season to control the population.
“It's an absolute scientific impossibility. You can't have an overabundance or too many alligators in a given area. Big gators keep small gators under control and if you take away the big gators, there's no telling what will happen,” Ferguson explained.
An unanswered question that could make neighborhood alligator sightings more common.
It is against the law to feed, kill or harm an alligator and if you do it could cost you at least a 500 dollar fine. But if in the rare chance an alligator grabs hold of you, whack the animal on the nose or give a hard poke to it's eyes.
State officials and the men we spoke to say there hasn't been a fatal alligator attack in the state of South Carolina in at least 100 years and there's less than one attack per year in the state.
Alligator Danger