Water Hazard - When Rewilding Bites Back
My 1988 Florida tale of a conservation success amid subtropical surburban sprawl remains relevant as ever more conflicts erupt between people and predators.
NEAR the end of a workday, Theron McBride dived beneath the surface of a man-made pond between the sixth and seventh holes of the Poinciana Country Club in Lake Worth, Florida, a sleepy town just inland from the splendor of Palm Beach. As a scuba diver for International Golf1 – a company that makes a business out of retrieving, refurbishing and reselling 6 million sunken golf balls a year – he spends much of each week submerged in water hazards.
A diferent kind of water hazard
On this sunny Tuesday afternoon the term water hazard would take on added significance. McBride had brought his girlfriend along so she could see what he did for a living. As he swam back and forth, scanning the mud for more balls to add to a mesh bag that already bulged with 400 or more, she saw an alligator pop out of a culvert and swim straight toward the spot where McBride was diving.
“She started screaming, and a couple of golfers started throwing balls at me to get my attention, but I didn’t notice a thing,” he recalls. Then he felt a sharp tug on one of his flippers, and the next thing he knew, he was being dragged to the bottom, foot first. McBride twisted around to see that an eight-foot-long alligator, a reptilian relic unchanged since the Oligocene Epoch 30 million years ago, had clamped its long jaws on his flipper.
After a brief struggle McBride was able to kick his foot free, leaving the flipper behind. Both human and alligator surfaced and swam briskly in opposite directions. “My girlfriend freaked,” he says.
This was clearly a case for Lieutenant Dick Lawrence, a wildlife officer for the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. Several days after the incident Lawrence arrived at the country club, equipped with the odd and slightly gruesome tools of his trade: a fishing rod with a four-pointed hook on the line, a pole tipped with a wire noose, and a roll of electrician’s tape. Within two hours he had snagged, wrestled, taped, and hog-tied the eight hundred twenty-fifth and eight hundred twenty-sixth alligators of his career — McBride’s attacker and another, shorter animal.
I wrote and photographed this article on increasing human-alligator conflicts in Florida in the summer of 1988 for Discover Magazine. I’m posting the story again because of its enduring relevance as people and once-depleted predators come into conflict from Florida to Cape Cod to Colorado and the Pacific coast (not to mention Australia and India). You can download a pdf here.
These days, more than half of Lawrence’s time is devoted to answering complaints about alligators. As increasing numbers of northerners flee to the Sunshine State, development is rapidly spreading inland from the state’s sparkling shores toward its flat, wet, sparsely populated interior. Ranks of expensive homes, often surrounding private golf courses and chains of man-made ponds, are being built on terrain that is transmogrified swamp.
With the help of a network of 14 professional trappers, Lawrence, the alligator coordinator for a large swath of south Florida, responds to complaints ranging from alligators threatening pets to alligators in swimming pools. (“Usually, when they end up in pools, it’s somebody pulling a prank,” Lawrence says.)
There are four other regions in the state with similar networks of coordinators and trappers. Some of the complaints are urgent. But many of the panicked calls are unwarranted, Lawrence says, coming from transplanted northerners who’ve never seen anything more exotic than a cockroach.
Until recently the captured alligators would have been relocated deeper into the swamps. Unfortunately for the alligators, that is no longer possible. Florida’s human population explosion has been paralleled by an alligator baby boom. After decades of conservation and successful battles to stem poaching, the alligator population has grown to at least one million.
“The fact is, what we have here isn’t a gator problem, it’s a people problem. But what am I supposed to do, refuse to catch one?”
The success of the species has meant that unlucky gators that come into conflict with humans are now taken away and killed. “It’s too bad, but it’s the gators that get the worst of it,” says Lawrence, a burly, tanned man with a fast pace to his southern accent that hints at his Minnesota origins. “The fact is, what we have here isn’t a gator problem, it’s a people problem. But what am I supposed to do, refuse to catch one? There’s always the chance that the alligator will do somebody harm, and I’d look pretty foolish.” With 71 people attacked in Florida in the last ten years, he can’t take that chance.
A WEEK after McBride’s misadventure, Lawrence is in his cluttered office, preparing to head out after alligator number 827. He starts the day over coffee and a pile of eight fresh alligator complaints that he grabs from his in-box. Holding a form at arm’s length, Lawrence squints to find the address. His farsightedness is troublesome in the office, but it proves valuable in the field, where he must scan the wind-dappled surface of ponds for a tiny quartet of protrusions – paired eyes and nostrils.
The form, filled out by Game Commission employees who take complaints over the telephone, lists a series of questions designed to determine whether an alligator is truly a nuisance or if the complainant is simply someone with an overactive imagination or unreasonable fears: “Is there human activity in the water? Is the alligator threatening pets, livestock; etc.? Is the alligator coming out on land?”
“Lots of people from up north are buying homes around here,” Lawrence says. “If they buy a home next to a canal, they’re bound to see gators. The next thing you know, I get a call: ‘Oh my God, it’s gonna get my kids!’ You explain to them he’s just there ’cause he’s coldblooded and he’s lying in the sun trying to raise his body temperature. Damn, a gator’s main diet is apple snails, raccoons, sick fish, ducks, turtles. But they don’t believe you.”
Newcomers to Florida generally aren’t aware that the alligator probably poses less of a threat than other, less obtrusive organisms, he says. “You don’t see us getting calls about the Bufo toads, with their toxin that can kill a dog in a heartbeat. Or the purple-tailed skunk, which can send a cat into convulsions. Or water moccasins. These are the real hazards down here. There are a lot of things more serious than an ol’ alligator laying on the bank.”
For each “nuisance” alligator a permit is typed up and given to a trapper in the appropriate region. The trapper then has 90 days to catch the suspect animal. “If he hasn’t caught it in that time, then it’s pretty obvious it’s not much of a nuisance,” says Lawrence. From July 1986 to June 1987, there were 6,784 complaints registered in the state, with 3,634 alligators captured as a result.
[In 2021, 9,441 nuisance gators were captured and killed. Keep in mind I wrote this in 1988! All these forces creating an “expanding bull’s eye” of human-predator overlap have intensified year by year, just as they’ve put more northerners in a region beset regularly by hurricanes. See my conversation with veteran Florida reporter Craig Pittman for more on that dangerous trend.]
Lawrence deems several of this day’s complaints legitimate. Big alligators can do harm: they pose at the very least a threat to pets and livestock, and at worst, to people. A dog running along a canal, a toddler falling into the water, or a careless swimmer are all potential prey for these animals, whose jaws snap shut reflexively when they encounter just about anything.
On June 4, 1988, for instance, a four-year-old girl who was walking a puppy along the shore of a lake in Port Charlotte was snatched by a ten-and-a-half-foot alligator. Another fatality had occurred the previous summer at Wakulla Springs State Park, when a skin diver ventured outside a roped-off swimming area. A little while later, as tourists in a “jungle boat” marveled at the scenery just down the Wakulla River from the park, they were startled to see an 11-foot, 415-pound alligator swimming along with the body of the diver in its jaws.
“An eleven-footer is a big gator to have around,” Lawrence says. “There is no way that a gator that big is not going to do something bad to somebody sometime.” Lawrence heads out into the bright day, replacing his reading glasses with sleek black sunglasses. He stops at the home of one of the trappers, Lee Kramer, a lanky blond man with sun-cured skin, sleepy-but-sharp hound-dog eyes, and a hunting knife and electronic beeper attached to his python-skin belt.
Kramer seems to like large animals with mean tempers and lots of teeth. Before turning to alligator trapping, which provides most of his income now, the former Navy and commercial pilot ran a 44-foot sport-fishing boat, often taking fishermen out in quest of sharks. He generates enough income from the state-authorized sale of the alligator hides and meat (somewhat of a delicacy in Florida, along the lines of venison) to make a living. Besides, he says, “It’s fun. It stops the general flow of bar conversation — especially since Crocodile Dundee hit the screen.”
Kramer trails behind Lawrence’s patrol car in a rugged blue pickup festooned with stickers announcing that he is an AUTHORIZED ALLIGATOR AGENT/TRAPPER and a license plate that reads EL GATOR.
Driving south on Route 95, Lawrence reflects on his 18 years on the force. “I used to be against killing the gators,” he says. “Nine years ago we used to release them. But then we started tagging some, and we found that thirty days later they’d turn up just a block or two from where they were caught.”
Sometimes an alligator would travel as much as 50 miles through south Florida’s network of flood control canals to get back to its home. As both alligators and people grew more numerous and incidents occurred more frequently, Lawrence says, “we found that wildlife officers were so busy gator trapping that they had no time for anything else. In those days I would have four or five gators in the back seat, crawling up the windows.”
He passes a billboard advertising the Indian Spring Golf and Tennis Country Club, which sprawls over a broad expanse just off the road. “That there five years ago used to be some of the best dove and quail habitat in the county. Now look at it,” he says, snorting. “And they’re still building.”
The two vehicles are waved through the security gates of a posh development called Delray Dunes Golf and Country Club, and they park in front of a gracious ranch house with a backyard — like that of every house around — that runs down to the edge of a serpentine pond.
The duo greets a homeowner, who stands by his screened-in swimming pool and points to an end of the pond where a nine-footer has been seen. Kramer scours the mud along the shore. He spots long, scratchy claw marks that could only be those of an alligator. In the silty shallows he points out a faint line — a tail drag, he calls it.
As Kramer scans the pond with binoculars, Lawrence stands on the steep bank, cups his hands around his mouth, and from somewhere down between his throat and his diaphragm generates a resonant nyuk, nyuk, nyuk sound. “That’s the sound a baby gator makes,” he says. “It’ll usually get their attention.” For those days when Lawrence doesn’t come along, Kramer keeps in his pickup a portable stereo tape player with a cassette filled with 20 minutes of Lawrence’s nyuks.
The only signs of action are occasional flurried splashes as largemouth bass chase minnows in the shallows. “Should get my bass rod out of the truck,” Kramer says. “We could do double duty.” Then a vague black shape breaks the surface. A bystander loudly sounds the alarm.
“Turtle,” says Lawrence without a second glance. After a half hour of alligator grunts and searching, Kramer spots something. “I see bubbles off to your left,” he tells Lawrence. Fishing pole in hand, Lawrence jogs off along the bank, his holstered revolver flopping against his hip. He skirts the pond until he reaches the far side and before he comes to a stop starts casting his weighted, barbed hook across the glassy surface and reeling it in. Nothing doing.
He sends the hook past a swirl in the water, and it briefly snags something. Lawrence heaves mightily, rocking back on his heels and whipping the rod into a question-mark curve. A black form thrashes the surface into foam, then the line slackens and the water calms. “Damn!” he hisses. “Lost him.”
The alligator has vanished. After a few moments Lawrence catches his breath. “Oh, well, if you caught every one of them, it’d just be a job.”
ON TO the next stop – a brand new development called Mahogany Bay. A neat row of months-old ranch houses abuts a man-made pond. Nearby, chattering sprinklers steadily water the synthetic hills and vales of a freshly sculpted and seeded golf course. A loud yelp breaks the stillness: “A snake!” A woman rushes out the back door of one of the identical houses, flailing a yellow plastic broom. Propelled by the broom, a dark squiggly object flies through the air across the neatly mowed lawn, landing at the pond’s edge.
“Such is life in south Florida,” says Kramer, watching from the other side of the pond. Lawrence returns from scouting an end of the pond where he’d spotted a long-dead animal that might have been a raccoon or cat, decomposing on the shore — a sure lure for a gator. “Nothing there. I may as well check this out,” Lawrence says, nodding toward the distressed woman. He races off in his car, bouncing across the intervening moguls of the golf course. By the time he gets to the house, the snake has slithered into the tea-dark water. When the woman describes it as green, he reassures her. “Couldn’t be a water moccasin. They’re black, and their mouths are white and puffy — cottonmouths.”
Then he gets on to the business of the day. “We’re looking for an alligator that’s been hanging around this pond. Seen any?” The woman hasn’t, but a neighbor says a large alligator had been sunning on the bank at the other end of the pond a couple of days ago. “If that carcass back there hasn’t drawn him out, he’s long gone,” Lawrence says. He and Kramer scan the pond one more time, then cross a rise to check out a drainage canal. “There are five thousand miles of canals in my territory alone,” Kramer says. “That’s how the gators get around.” The trappers’ eyes light up for a second time that day as they spy several largemouth bass massacring minnows in the shallows. “Damn bass are cannibals today,” Lawrence says.
Hunters Run is next, an enormous expanse of verdant fairways and perfect greens, laced with a network of canals and ponds. “This place is just crawling with gators,” Lawrence says. “We’re only a few miles from the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge” — take one alligator out of a pond, and there is sure to be a replacement within weeks.
A golfer passes, driving a humming electric golf cart emblazoned with SYLVIA . “Seen any gators today?” Lawrence asks. The golfer claims to have seen a 15-footer. Politely feigning credulousness, Lawrence says, “You see him again, you call me, y’hear?” Once the golfer is out of earshot Lawrence says, “Golly, I’d make love to a gator that big.”
Alligator mississippiensis does occasionally get that large, but in 18 years, Lawrence says, the biggest he ever caught was a 12-foot 8-incher that used to bask on a runway at West Palm Beach International Airport. In an incident that made the local news, Lawrence was lowered upside down into a storm drain to get a noose on the 600-pound animal; the alligator had to be hauled out with a backhoe. Lest he get cocky about that achievement, Kramer reminds him that his biggest alligator was
13 feet, 6 inches. At the next tee a golfer sets his spikes, takes a practice swing, then proceeds to drive his ball straight into a stand of tall pine trees. “I knew he’d do that,” Lawrence says. “See how he keeps his feet close together?”
The convoy of two winds its way around the course, pausing politely as golfers make their shots, then continuing on to the next water hazard. As he crests a knoll overlooking a large pond, Lawrence stomps on the brakes and leaps out, rod in hand. “He’s right there!” Lawrence shouts to Kramer, who’s already hotfooting it toward the water with his own rod. The water boils right at the shoreline. Lawrence nearly slides into the pond as he casts and hauls back with a sharp grunt. But the alligator’s leathery back defies the hook’s honed barbs. Lawrence falls over backward as the hook zings back at him and a large alligator makes for the depths.
A few minutes later they spot an alligator surfacing toward the far shore: a black lumpy line in a blinding sea of wavetop reflections. Lawrence’s blood is up now (he is an avid fisherman and deer hunter as well as wildlife officer). After a long, slow morning, everything happens in fast motion. Lawrence tosses the rod into the car and races off across the course. Several elderly golfers who have arrived at a nearby tee gawk. “Go get him! “one yells.
Lawrence speeds around the pond, his car door swinging open because the rod didn’t fit inside, following golf-cart paths that aren’t really wide enough for his Chevrolet Celebrity. He narrowly misses a line of palm trees. His head hits the roof as the car catapults over a bump. Once again he runs to the water’s edge, casting and heaving, casting and heaving.
The water erupts about 50 yards from shore. “Now I’ve got you,” Lawrence howls, and then he starts to talk to himself as the lunging reptile threatens to jerk the rod from his hands. “Hold him, hold on.” Perhaps because of his penchant for sport fishing, Lawrence only uses 30-pound-test line to catch 100- pound-plus alligators. Slowly he works the alligator toward shore, using the relentless pull of the flexing rod to tire it out.
The alligator is just a few yards away, half-hidden by the brownish water, when Kramer rushes into the pond and heaves a heavier line, tied to a second hook, over the dark silhouette. The black-backed, yellow-bellied animal slaps and twists and rolls and claps its tooth-studded jaws, trying to escape, but it’s no use.
Lawrence drops his rod and leaps onto the beached alligator, straddling it like a horse and forcing its snout to the mud with his hands. He grasps its closed mouth with his fingers and arches its head up. “Tape! Tape!”
Kramer grabs a roll of electrician’s tape and quickly winds it around and around the snout, which Lawrence is still holding shut with his hands. The alligator’s four-foot tail lashes side to side.
The taping and trussing takes five more minutes, until the alligator has its forelimbs tied and mouth secured. “We can’t take chances,” says Lawrence. “One time I taped up a gator, a ten-footer. Had a new officer with me. The gator was hissing and this guy was walking around it. The gator’s tail whipped around, and the officer jumped straight up, but he didn’t jump high enough. The tail took his feet out from under him. On the way down, the tail came back and slapped him in the head. Knocked him out cold.”
Several golf carts pull up to the spot on the fairway to where Lawrence and Kramer have carried the alligator. The golfers gather around and stare quietly at the immobilized reptile, which emits a low, steady growl and moves its snout back and forth. “Where are you going to take it?” asks one golfer. ” It’s going to be killed,” Lawrence answers. “Don’t got a place to put them anymore.”
“Oh,” says the golfer, looking surprised.
Lawrence and Kramer heave the heavy animal into the back of the pickup. After Kramer takes it home, the alligator will be shot once in the head or struck with an axe. It is then drained of blood, washed in soap and water to clean the hide, chilled and skinned. The hide is scraped, salted, and cured. Periodically, the hides are sent to Gainesville, where they are graded and auctioned, with exotic leather dealers from around the world placing bids. The state gets $30 per alligator, which helps pay for the alligator-control program; the rest of the money goes to the trapper.
At the last sale, hides went for $42.70 per foot, says Lawrence. At that rate, a 10-foot alligator means $397; the trapper can also sell the alligator tail meat, which can fetch from $5 to $8 per pound. The meat is sold in boxes marked with a seal that proves it was taken under permit. “They sell all they can get,” Lawrence says. “You can’t supply the restaurants with enough.” Lawrence himself is not a lover of grilled gator tail. “I like it, but I wouldn’t drive out of my way to get it.”
Just before Kramer drives away, a deeply tanned greenskeeper looks into the bed of the truck. “I just had a gator burger last week,” he says.
One week later Lawrence is back in his office, staring at a new pile of alligator complaints. He’s already up to gator number 832.
As he heads out the door, bound for a retirement village to capture number 833, he tells a secretary, “I’ll be back around three, if the gators don’t get me.”
Resources
Living with Wildlife - Alligators - a video from the same agency
Living With Alligators - a guide from the state wildlife agency
Here’s my related 2016 Dot Earth post: “The Peril that Lurks as People and Reptiles Flourish in Florida.”
International Golf was quite a sustainability-focused business - recovering millions of balls for reuse across dozens of golf courses in Florida. Here’s a 1990 feature on the company, which employed nearly a dozen divers at its peak. And don’t miss this 2015 Golf Digest story and video about a golfball-retrieving millionaire!
Thank you Andy for this story. The topic urban/forest interface of wildlife and human living space and humans interacting. I live in such a place in NW Washington. I have a beautiful before and after example. Long ago, I moved into a 55 yo second growth doug fir grove and built a house in it , next is managed commercial forest tract, 50,000 acres. Now these trees are 109. The canopy has closed in and we are in the forest.
Early days, evenings, we would count racoons, opossom hanging out around our house. We were not feeding but at times a grossly obese racoon would waddle through. Seriously, I think folks were trapping and moving these animals from more urban other side of Lake Whatcom to the DNR logging road nearby..
This has all changed because of changing regulations and our predators have recovered, hunting bear and cougar with dogs has been banned. We would often, many times each year, see/ hear hunting parties, see/help rescue lost dogs. Then, when hunting with dogs was stopped, also trapping, the predators returned to our valley and are providing their ecological services.
Our valley, Squallicum, a city watershed now has a family of Cougar. In spring a Black Bear and her cubs come through in perfect timing with ripening native berries. The Oppossum kits, in our game cam most of the winter suddenly dissapear early spring when cougar passes through. Up the road a log/wood stump pile house, there since 1983, now houses coyotes and other wildlife. Very handsome animals, looking groomed like show pets.
Iv'e come to think about our urban/forest interface as an ecological niche in itself. The wildlife is attracted, the predators, because of the opportunities are attracted and now a dog or a cat free ranging is short lived. Even now, neighbbors are still adapting to this change. Don't feed the wildlife they say but that is what they are doing.
The bears without the hunters and the dogs they have now multiplied and discovered nearby trailer court garbage cans. Last summer, a sow black bear and her cub were working the Cascade Oregon grape berries in the forest understory here everywhere.
Olsen Creek logging road is used by local people for hiking and biking. The bear and her cub that day were using the same road. A hiker confronted them and tried to shoo the cub off the trail. She attacked him with claws then retreated. The wounded hiker complained, it made the local news, and as Washinngton Fish and Game explained to me afterwards they were compelled by policy to kill aggressive bears. This is so sad, I have been face to face with these bears, these are not aggressive animals.
My neighbors do not approve of my kitchen leftovers feeding station in the forest because of their lost pets. Myself I feel it is a privilege to be here watching. We see Bobcat here, and Fox. I've a game cam image of a local Coyotte carrying half a cat.
I loved the alligator saga which reminded me of alligator sightings and gettings-away fast in Louisiana. And that pitiful, pitiful gator purse! I have seen its cousins in many a dusty. roadside store.
Also, I congratulate you on the paintings included lately--such a pleasure to see.