St. Tammany deputy resolves alligator problem
Baton Rouge Advocate. September 9, 2007, Page 1A.
SLIDELL—Howard McCrea, a nuisance-alligator hunter from St. Tammany Parish, had an encounter recently with a 7-foot mother readying her nest uncomfortably close to a woman’s home in Slidell.
McCrea threw a hook across the gator’s back, then spent 45 minutes wrangling her to the bank of a pond. The alligator had come from Bayou Paquet, just 20 feet away, he said.
The alligator, full of eggs, hissed loudly at him, McCrea said, as he taped her snout shut and loaded her onto his trailer. He set her free in Honey Island Swamp, north of Slidell, within the hour.
McCrea, a St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s deputy, likened the tug of war to deep-sea fishing.
“If she weren’t tired out and full of eggs,” the alligator would have put up a longer fight, he said.
McCrea is one of 62 nuisance alligator hunters the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries contracts to handle problem reptiles.
Alligators in odd locations rouse the 60-year-old McCrea at all hours of the night.
The population of both humans and alligators ballooned in St. Tammany Parish after Hurricane Katrina. The rebuilding and cleanup effort in the parish has disturbed the alligator population, some of them recent arrivals, McCrea said.
The storm surge pushed gators up from Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish, he said.
“I would have never have thought years ago that an alligator would have come with the surge, but they did,” he said.
McCrea said he saw at least 15 dead alligators immediately after Katrina. In the days after the storm, McCrea was swamped with eight to 10 nuisance calls a day.
“A lot of times I would just push them back into the bayou. We didn’t have time to move them.”
Biologists think alligators try to return to the same area where they hatched once they reach 4- to 6-feet long, McCrea said.
“The surge pushed them and it will still be a couple more years before they really get back to where they want to go,” McCrea said.
St. Tammany’s gators
St. Tammany Parish is one of the busiest for alligator complaints and Sheriff Jack Strain Jr. employs McCrea full time to deal with the problem.
An alligator becomes a nuisance when it grows longer than 4 feet and displays aggressive behavior toward humans.
“When you walk up to the bank and he comes up there and stops,” that’s a nuisance gator, McCrea said.
Noel Kinler, the head of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ Alligator Management Program, estimated that the department has received 6,000 nuisance alligator calls from across the state so far this year.
The majority of nuisance alligators over 4 or 5 feet long are “harvested” – killed for their hides and meat, Kinler said.
Nuisance-alligator hunters killed more than 3,000 alligators in 2006, 500 more than in 2005, according to department statistics.
But not every call results in a dead alligator. Hunters have the option of relocating the reptiles, Kinler said, and in other cases, the alligators never are found.
Kinler said he often is asked why hunters don’t relocate every nuisance alligator.
“We don’t want to be handling the same nuisance alligator multiple times,” he said. “It’s kind of dangerous to handle large, live gators.”
The hunters have an incentive to kill the alligators.
Processors pay them for the gators’ hides and meat, Kinler said. The department does not pay the hunters to relocate them.
“We encourage the hunter to harvest the gator,” Kinler said. “It covers his costs.”
Nuisance-alligator hunters typically have other jobs, Kinler said, and do not depend on the alligators for their primary income.
Strain said he assigned McCrea to deal with alligators 10 years ago when subdivisions began springing up next to swamps in the parish.
“I was convinced as more and more people moved into the area that gators lived.” Strain said. “If we did not do something to control the nuisance gators, we could be dealing with a potentially deadly situation.”
St. Tammany is the only parish in the state that has outlawed feeding alligators. Anyone caught feeding the reptiles within 500 feet of a residence or camp faces a $500 fine or 90 days in jail.
Feeding gators is dangerous, McCrea said, because the reptiles lose their fear of people and return again and again for more food.
“Many times our residents are their own worst enemies. They’ll start feeding these gators when they’re very small – like most animals, they’re cute and cuddly – and then it grows into a 10-foot eating machine. One day you go home and your pet dog is no more,” Strain said.
McCrea has been teaching schoolchildren for 10 years about alligators and the danger of feeding them. He brings along a 4-foot alligator.
“You have to change a whole generation,” McCrea said. Now, “Kids say, ‘Daddy, we’re not supposed to feed the alligators. It’s against the law.”
No deadly gator attacks
Louisiana lies in a swath of coast and wetland that stretches from South Carolina to Texas. That’s where American alligators make their homes.
Many of Louisiana’s alligators are concentrated in the state’s sparsely populated 3 million acre coastal marsh, Kinler said.
Overhunting depressed Louisiana’s alligator population in the early 1960s but savvy management has helped it rebound to 1.5 million today, Kinler said.
“That’s a lot of alligators,” he said.
The population is similar to Florida’s, Kinler said. But Florida has a much larger problem with alligators attacking humans.
Since 1948, 21 people have died in the United States from alligator attacks. All but one of those deaths occurred in Florida. Louisiana has no recorded case of an alligator killing a human, Kinler said.
“In Florida there is much more encroachment of people into alligator habitat,” Kinler said. “We don’t have as many people adjacent to alligators as Florida does.”
Last summer, after three deadly alligator attacks in five days in Florida, people in St. Tammany Parish rang McCrea’s phone constantly, he said.
McCrea declined to reveal how many alligators he has handled this year, saying he wants to avoid alarming the population.
Alligator relocator
Whenever McCrea catches a reptile at least 10 feet long, he puts an alligator-shaped sticker on his white, Sheriff’s Office Ford F-150 pickup truck .
The truck has 25 alligator stickers now, and he needs to add three or four more from this year, he said. The biggest gator so far was one 13 feet, 4 inches long he caught in 2003.
Three brown caimans McCrea caught in 2005 also are commemorated on the truck.
A man had been keeping the caimans – a type of crocodile native to Central and South America – as pets in his Abita Springs home when one escaped, frightening neighbors, McCrea said.
Some days, McCrea’s searches don’t bear fruit. Wearing boots and hunting camouflage emblazoned with the Sheriff’s Department logo, he scanned the water one recent afternoon near a boat launch on Bayou Vincent.
McCrea had received a call days earlier about a 4-foot gator that approached a woman fishing from a boat dock across Bayou Vincent from old Southern Shipyard.
McCrea found no alligator that afternoon, – no green eyes poking out of the water.
McCrea said he is known for trying to relocate alligators instead of killing them.
“People will call me because they’ll know I’ll take it alive,” he said. “They know if I have to kill an alligator there’s something really wrong with it, because I have the reputation for taking alligators alive.”
When McCrea gets calls about tiny alligators – unwelcome guests but too small to be considered nuisances – he sometimes takes them home to fatten them up.
Several of those alligators, none over 2 feet long, swam in a shallow tub of water in McCrea’s yard on a recent rainy afternoon. Two turtles tucked their heads into their shells, seemingly uneasy over sharing space with their reptilian relatives.
When people approached, the young alligators hissed loudly.
McCrea eventually will release them into an alligator management area – isolated marsh habitat – where he hopes they will thrive.
“I believe alligators have a right to live,” he said.