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As gators court, they cavort, in ponds, yards and driveways Beware the season of love.
By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 17, 2002
Nobody knows how long it was there.
The first woman who dropped her child at Katherine Busbee's home, a licensed day care, never saw the beast.
But a second mom did.
"Her eyes were huge," Mrs. Busbee said Tuesday, after all the excitement had died down and the deputies had left her home in unincorporated Largo. "She told me, 'You've got an alligator under your car!' "
Mrs. Busbee dispatched her husband, armed only with a camera, to check it out. Sure enough, there it was, under her gold 2000 Mitsubishi Galant: a 3-foot alligator that apparently wandered over from a retention pond.
Got a gator in the garage? Must be springtime in Florida.
This is the time of year when male gators emerge from winter hibernation and go looking for love in all the wrong places. They make a splash at the pool, create a commotion at the backyard barbecue, wander across sidewalks and roads. They go from the object of gee-whiz curiosity to oh-my-God panic.
Four were killed crossing roads in Brevard County last week. A 23-year-old Port St. John man died Saturday when his pickup truck hit a gator and flipped several times just east of Cocoa.
On Monday, a school custodian stepped on a 6-footer on the campus of Pembroke Pines Charter School. Ricardo Pena Loza was walking between buildings when, "I felt this lump under my foot and heard a growl."
The alligator charged, snapping its jaws, he said. The gator gave chase as he ran for help. A trapper caught and killed it.
Two weeks ago, in Port Charlotte, Stephanie Feola was headed home from a date when she ran over a 7-footer. "The car started shaking, and it was lifting the front end up," she said. "I was screaming. I thought it was going to come up through the floor."
The gator bit the front bumper of her 2002 Mitsubishi Eclipse before she drove off to call police. A trapper got that gator too.
The wandering gators bring a touch of the prehistoric to the 21st century Sunshine State, and their appearance both repels and attracts. The one under Mrs. Busbee's Mitsubishi brought her neighbors flocking to gander and take a few photos, especially after a couple of deputies decided to capture it.
As for the children in the day care home, "the kids were just going nuts. They could see it through the front window," she said.
There was a time 40 years ago when alligator sightings in Florida were rare. They had been hunted to near-extinction. But conservation efforts brought them roaring back, and now there are about 1-million of them in Florida lakes, rivers and swamps, not to mention the occasional canal and retention pond.
The state's human population has boomed too, topping 15-million. Many of the newcomers want to live along the water, and many are unaware that the alligators were there first.
"They're part of Florida and its ecosystem," said Gary Morse of the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "But people find it hard to understand. They say, 'An alligator in my back yard is not a part of the ecosystem.' And we say, 'Well, yes it is.' "
Generally, if the gator is less than 4 feet long or it is not aggressive, state officials leave it alone.. If it is more than 4 feet, though, and has begun snapping at passing Mitsubishis, they call a licensed trapper to kill it. The trappers sell the skins and meat.
As more of Florida has been built up, the number of alligator complaints has grown, Morse said. In 1978 the state fielded about 5,000 complaints. Last year the number passed 16,000.
"The more people we have entering wildlife habitat, the more calls we get," Morse said.
That's true not just for alligators but for all sorts of critters, including bears, he said.
But those toothy gators tend to get the most attention. Since 1948, when a woman swimming in the Weeki Wachee River was severely bitten, there have been about 300 recorded gator attacks on humans. Twelve were fatal.
Last year was the worst ever for fatal attacks, with three, said Allan "Woody" Woodward, a state biologist. Those killed were a 2-year-old boy in Winter Haven, a 70-year-old man in Sarasota and an 81-year-old man in Sanibel.
But during the past 25 years the rate of severe attacks has declined, he said.
About 15 people a year are bitten by gators, but most are hunters or exhibitors. Of the rest, Woodward's study found, many "occurred when people bumped into alligators when retrieving golf balls in ponds or water hazards, or when they were wading in the water."
Kent Vliet, a University of Florida gator expert, said the end of Florida's drought may drive more gators into suburbia this spring.
"Now as the water levels begin to rise again, the gators are beginning to move out," Vliet said. "People may not realize that there have been gators there before because it's been dry for so long."
Mrs. Busbee, a Florida native, said she was not surprised by, or scared of, the little gator under her car. But the deputies took care to avoid its teeth, which were big enough to do some damage.
They fashioned a makeshift lasso from an old tie-down strap. Then they put the car in neutral and let it roll down the driveway, uncovering the gator. They tossed their lasso around its snout until they could seal its mouth shut with electrical tape.
Finally the deputies loaded the gator into their cruiser and drove off. A state wildlife officer later released it into Lake Seminole.
As for the mom who initially reported the gator, Mrs. Busbee said, she didn't stick around for the capture: "She was like, 'I am outta here.' "