sign said do not feed the alligators. Underneath someone had taken a Sharpie and written, “your leg.”
Do not feed the alligators your leg. Good advice. I spent a little time on the Internet trying to find out about the Conecuh National Forest before our trip. You know what it’s like, you start out with a simple search and one thing leads to another which leads to another which leads to another, and before you know it, you’ve got way too much information. I knew I had way too much information when I read about the man who had his leg ripped off by an alligator at the Open Pond Recreation Area. The Open Pond Recreation Area was where we set up our base camp.
Everything you read about alligators tells you something like, “Attacks on humans are rare.” I’m sure that’s what the one-legged man thought. Everything you read also tells you that alligators are “carnivorous” and “opportunistic” feeders. In other words, they’ll eat anything that gets too close as long as it’s meat. Gators will lurk at a water’s edge and can lunge about five feet to snatch an unsuspecting prey. That prey includes fish, turtles, birds, and even other alligators. And guess what? They enjoy a tasty mammal. You know, “mammals,” those hairy, warm-blooded animals like squirrels, raccoons, beavers, dogs, cats and me. Gators are America’s largest reptiles, and they are not considered “large” until they get to be seven or eight feet long. They can get up to fourteen feet or more and weigh a thousand pounds. When they get that big, they like to attack their prey by grabbing a leg or an arm and spinning until they rip it off.
Most alligator attacks happen in south Florida. Experts say that’s because humans keep moving into the gators’ natural habitat. The gators learn to adapt. Some have been seen climbing fences to get at pets. I couldn’t help wondering how the Conecuh alligators have adapted to people setting up nylon tents in their habitat around Open Pond.
Maybe I worry too much. According to what I read, gators get sluggish and don’t eat when temperatures get down around seventy degrees. When it starts to get cold, they burrow a hole in the ground and crawl in. They lie still and quiet until it warms up again. That’s because they are reptiles, and reptiles are cold blooded. Cold blooded animals have their body temperature regulated by the temperature of the world around them. When the temperature outside goes down, the temperature inside the gator goes down. When the temperature outside goes up . . . you get the idea. Seventy degrees or so seems to be temperature where they slow down to the point they don’t eat. Here at the Conecuh in early April the temperature is what? Yep. Seventy degrees. So are the gators waking up? Are they hungry after dozing in a hole in the ground for four months? Have they been dreaming of that first springtime meal? Perhaps a tasty, warm-blooded mammal?
No. Not to hear my mother the herpetologist tell it. She says, “The alligators will not be active and feeding until temperatures reach above twenty-seven degrees Celsius and maintain that temperature over a period of days.”
For those of us who are not biologists, she meant to say, “The alligators will be out looking for something to eat when it gets into the eighties.”
Okay, this means I should not have to worry about alligators during the first week of April. Still, when I saw the sign that read,
Do not feed the alligators
your leg
I sort of missed my little sister. She’s smaller than me and not as fast.
7
We set up our base camp at the Open Pond campsite, and then I took off to get the lay of the land while there were still a couple of hours of daylight left. Open Pond is the largest of a series of lakes in the area. There are a couple of smaller lakes, or “ponds” as they call them down there, named Ditch Pond and Buck Pond. Then there are even smaller ponds that may or may not have names. Each pond is separated from the next by sandy soils and longleaf pines. Thick, aquatic grasses run out about ten feet from the banks and around the entire borders of the ponds. At Buck Pond, a wooden fishing pier extends from the bank to the outer edges of the aquatic grasses and then makes a “T” so you can stand and fish. The pier is about six inches above the water, and I would guess a heavy rain could send water right over the top of it.
I was standing on the bank, looking at the pier and thinking how impossible it would be to spot an alligator in the thick weeds and how an alligator can lunge up to five feet with no warning and how alligators in south Florida have been seen climbing fences, when a girl yelled, “Take a picture; it’ll last longer!”
The girl thought I was staring at her.
I tried to explain that I was just trying to spot an alligator in the aquatic grasses.
“Aquatic grasses?” she said. “Weeds is what they are, water weeds. You ain’t got to be scared o’ gators? Too cool for gators.”
“I’m not scared of gators,” I told her. “I’m just wondering, that’s all.”
“Come back in May,” the girl said. “Gators get their spring fever in May. You wonderin’ ’bout gators, come back in May, if you ain’t scared.” She turned her back to me and started tossing bread into the water.
She turned her back on me.
I strolled out on to the pier and said, “Of course I’m not scared of alligators. Besides, everybody knows alligators don’t become active and start feeding until the temperature gets above twenty-seven degrees Celsius for a few days.”
“Twenty-seven degrees Celsius? What-n-the-hell are you talkin’ about?” she exclaimed.
Hell? She said “hell.” If I said “hell” I would get an hour long lecture from each parent explaining how cursing is the way of the “uneducated mind.” A mind “lacking the vocabulary for more appropriate descriptive terms.” That would be an hour from each parent. Two hours. It would be easier on all of us if they would just wash my mouth out with soap.
“Hell,” I said, “twenty-seven degrees Celsius is eighty-something degrees Fahrenheit. Everybody knows that.”
“Everybody?” she said. Long, thick, shaggy, black hair seemed to swirl in slow-motion as she spun around to confront me. She said again, “Everybody?”
It was not a question I wanted to answer at that point. What I wanted to do was jump into the water weeds and disappear.
The girl was about my height, maybe an inch or two taller. She was wearing cut-off jeans that came down almost to her knees and a red and white Christmassy-looking sweater that seemed out of place in the spring green of the Conecuh. She wore black Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars and blue socks. She looked me right in the eye and said, “My name’s Leah. I’m fifteen years old. And you are?”
I told her my name and didn’t mention my age. Well, if I couldn’t impress her with my age, I would impress her with my vast knowledge. I spent the next ten minutes or so telling this girl everything she needed to know about alligators.
She was polite enough as she listened. When I was through she said, “You ain’t never seen a gator out in the wild, have you?”
“My mom’s a herpetologist,” I said.
“You ain’t never seen a gator out in the wild,” she said again. “Come back in May. That’s when gators get their
