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ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION (Georgia) 20 April 05 Allie the gator calls Dacula pond home (Mark Davis)
Dacula dogs, look out. You kids? Listen to your mamas and stay away from Carl Fowler's pond.
Miss Allie's on the prowl.
Or Mr. Allie; no one has gotten close enough to this Gwinnett gator to say whether it's a boy or girl. It's taken up residence in a half-acre pond outside Dacula, far from a gator's usual haunts, hissing at passers-by and giving everyone mean looks.
Call it Gator Garbo: It wants to be left alone.
"My son said, 'It must be a girl. It's not satisfied with nothing,' " said Teresa Fowler, whose father-in-law, Carl, owns the pond on Franklin Circle where Allie lives.
Tuesday morning, she stood near the water's edge hoping her pooch, Dixie, was inside the house. Allie sat in the shadows about 75 feet away, looking grumpy.
"At first, I thought it was exciting and fun and neat and pretty unusual to have an alligator here," Fowler said. "Now I wish it would go away."
Allie's days in Gwinnett are numbered, state officials said Tuesday. They've hired a trapper to pack the gator's bags.
As gators go, this Alligator mississippiensis, or American alligator, is barely more than a pair of shoes and a handbag, but be warned: Allie is toothier than a bag of dentures. The gator's about 5 feet long, and perhaps 5 years old, state biologists guessed.
The creature spends most mornings snoozing in the sun, then sliding into the woods beyond the pond's dam when afternoons turn hot. Nights, the gator slums in the murky depths of Taylor's little pond.
No one knows where the gator came from. Worse, they don't know where Allie's going.
"It's an alligator," said Heather Broker, 17, who decided to stay in her boyfriend's Chevy pickup Tuesday morning after her guy stopped to eyeball the reptile. "I've never even seen one, except on TV."
Shawn Pyles remained in another Chevy truck, stopped in the middle of Franklin Circle, and stared at the gator. Allie, as animated as a cinderblock, ignored him.
"I just don't want it to go under my fence and get my dog," said Pyles, who lives in Barimore, a subdivision of two-story homes on a ridge overlooking the pond. "It's pretty weird.
"I want to know how it got here."
The state Department of Natural Resources would like to know, too. It learned about Allie last week when folks said an alligator was in the pond. The agency dispatched a biologist to the site, and he came back with an expert's assessment: An alligator was in the pond.
"I would suspect a person played a role in it being there," said state biologist Scott Frazier, who thinks Allie may have been a pet that got dumped after outgrowing its welcome at someone's home. "It seems unnatural that it would go so far outside its range."
Gators are abundant in South Georgia, but their ranks fall off quickly at the state's fall line, a diagonal stretching from Columbus to Augusta that delineates North Georgia's Piedmont plateau from the flatter, warmer coastal plain of the south.
Frazier doubts that Allie swam up some river until it saw Fowler's pond and decided its traveling days were done.
The department, responsible for wayward wildlife — bears that wander into the burbs, raccoons that scurry through pet doors, deer that leap into back yards, to name a few — has hired a trapper to get the gator, said state biologist Don McGowan.
Whither Allie? Ideally, the trapper will take the gator to some wet spot in South Georgia, McGowan said.
If the creature is too familiar with human beings and cannot easily be returned to the wild, Allie's days may be numbered — the gator, he said, may be "harvested."
That would be fine with Fowler, who watched in nervous fascination Monday when someone tossed the gator a raw chicken.
Allie "grabbed that chicken and slung it all around and tore off a piece of it," she said. "It was pretty scary."
OK, kids and dogs. You've been warned.
Allie the gator calls Dacula pond home

np

JOURNAL CONSTITUTION (Atlanta, Georgia) 22 April 05 Miss Allie the gator is missing (Mark Davis)
Miss Allie, where are you?
Allie the wayward gator, who popped up recently in a Dacula pond and immediately became a media darling, apparently has turned tail and run. No one knows whither Allie, or whether Allie, or what-the-heck Allie.
State officials say they don't know what the heck, either. They've suggested that a trapper who was planning to come to Dacula this weekend to snare the gator not make the trip.
Dacula resident Teresa Fowler, who's kept a pretty close eye on Allie, said she is just as bamboozled as the state guys as to the reptile's location.
"I haven't seen it for two days," the Dacula resident said Thursday. "I don't know where it is."
Allie, a 5-foot Alligator mississippiensis, or American alligator, surfaced more than a week ago in the pond belonging to Teresa Fowler's father-in-law, Carl Fowler. The pond, a half-acre hole that you could easily cast a Jitterbug across, is located on Franklin Circle, about 3 miles south of downtown Dacula.
Locals promptly dubbed the beast Miss Allie, freely admitting they didn't know the gender of the toothy visitor. Somehow, they surmised, the gator was a girl. Perhaps it was Allie's habit of hissing at men who came too close?
The gator hasn't been seen since Tuesday afternoon, when it slithered down an embankment, nosed about in the mud and vanished in the marshy area near Teresa Fowler's house. That night, Fowler's indignant dog, Dixie, spent the night in the basement.
Wednesday afternoon, Teresa Fowler escorted two biologists from the state Department of Natural Resources about the site, showing them where Allie disappeared. The biologists, who brought along a 12-foot cage in case they saw the gator, went away stumped.
"The question is, whereabouts is it?" biologist Don McGowan asked Thursday. He and a colleague spent an hour or so stomping about in the woods Wednesday afternoon before admitting he was durned if he knew where the reptile went. McGowan headed back to his office in Social Circle, the gator cage rattling in the bed of his pickup.
Thursday, McGowan contacted the trapper who had agreed to snag Allie and told the guy to reconsider his gator-grabbing plans. McGowan thinks Allie may have followed the creek to the Apalachee River, not too distant from Fowler's home, and headed some place quieter — perhaps back toward South Georgia, where gators tend to hang out.
"It's up to him if he makes the trip," McGowan said.
Miss Allie the gator is missing