Newt-guy Comment: If you read this before going to the URL to see the photos, methinks it gives you a larger-than-life impression about the ferocity of this construction-site gator?
BRYAN-COLLEGE STATION EAGLE (Bryan, Texas) 01 June 05 No room at pet store for alligator (Brett Nauman)
Photo: A 4-foot alligator bared rows of razor-sharp teeth and lunged at Jim Dixon as he tried to capture the reptile at a construction site Tuesday in southern College Station. (Dave McDermand)
Hiding beneath the sludge of a watery ditch, the male gator two hours earlier had attacked a construction worker, leaving teeth marks in the man’s rubber boots.
With great caution, Dixon slipped a wire noose around the beast’s scaly neck. The irate gator hissed as Dixon motioned to his wife, Mary, for a thick rubber band to place around the animal’s powerful jaws.
“ I wasn’t scared,” said Dixon, a retired Texas A&M University professor, moments after the gator was restrained and put in the bed of a pickup. “I’ve done this before. We’ve caught them all over like this.”
Dixon gets an alligator call at least once a year. On Tuesday, game warden Chad Jones requested the herpetologist’s services along Wellborn Road where a pet supply store is under construction.
The alligator startled a worker excavating a water pipe on the site shortly after 10 a.m. Though the gator’s teeth mangled one of the man’s boots, the worker was not injured, said Janice Lipp, a manager of the future store.
Construction workers and employees of Close Quarters Feed & Pet Supply watched the gator swim in the ditch near the water pipe as they waited for Dixon to capture it Tuesday.
“ I bet he’s hungry, the poor thing,” Lipp said to others watching the angry and frightened alligator. “If I lived a little closer, I’d go home and get him a piece of chicken.”
But that’s not what you’re supposed to do if you encounter an alligator, said Jones, who comes across the reptiles a couple of times each year as a game warden in Brazos County.
Alligators are typically predatorial. But if people feed them, they lose the drive to hunt and their natural fear of humans, Jones said.
Dixon, who retired from A&M in 1993, said the alligator caught Tuesday likely was pushed out of his habitat by a larger male gator. It’s now breeding season for alligators.
The beast is probably 3 to 4 years old, based on his length, Jones said. Alligators are known to grow as long as 12 feet and live up to 25 years.
Although the construction site is not near the Navasota or Brazos rivers, Dixon said alligators can travel 10 to 12 miles across dry land to find a new home.
Photo: Texas game warden Chad Jones (left) requested the help of retired Texas A&M professor Jim Dixon in capturing a 4-foot alligator Tuesday at a College Station construction site. (Dave McDermand)
“ We’re going to turn him back out into the wild,” Jones said of the captured gator, not revealing the location. “We’re going to take him to a place where there’s no people and he won’t bother anyone.”
Through the years, Dixon has been called to capture alligators all over the Bryan-College Station area, he said. His wife usually accompanies him and holds the bag, Dixon said.
The trick in alligator hunting, Dixon said, is to wait for the reptile’s jaws to close before trying to capture it, and to hold those jaws tightly until they’re restrained. A mistake can be painful, he added.
“ They have tremendous closing power with their jaws, but they don’t have much ability for opening up,” Dixon said. “I know, because I’ve been bitten before on the hand. It smarts.”
No room at pet store for alligator
