Alligators and Crocodiles

by THOMAS BARBOUR

1

SOMETHING has happened to the alligators and crocodiles of Florida. Early travelers feared them, for they apparently hunted in packs and were fearless, really terrifying animals. Today they are not only pitifully reduced in numbers, but they are craven beasts, seldom seen by day. Their nature appears to have changed.

First and foremost let me say that the names alligator and crocodile are not interchangeable. They belong to two very different sorts of animals. Generally speaking, alligators, of which there are only two species, one in the southeasternmost part of the United States and the other in China, are heavybodied animals having flat snouts with rounded ends; they are always dark-colored, the common Florida species being black with yellow markings. Crocodiles are grayish or greenish, much more slender than alligators, and have sharp, generally pointed snouts. There are many species, which are found in most of the tropical parts of the world. The rumor that the crocodile’s upper jaw is movable, and that the beast differs in this way from the alligator, is nonsense. The principal differences by which the two are separated by naturalists are anatomical and too technical to detail here.

Dr. Jeffries Wyman was the original discoverer of the crocodile in Florida. Crocodiles had been reported earlier, but the one Dr. Wyman identified was taken from the Miami River at the point where it enters Key Biscayne bay — where Miami is now.

Many years ago the crocodiles were much more abundant than in our day; in some open bodies of water in the mangrove forests over where Miami Beach is now, they positively swarmed. One of these crocodile holes was in the confines of Hallandale; another was right behind the present location of the St. Francis Hospital.

When Commodore Ralph Middleton Munroe wrote his story in 1930, he had the following to say regarding crocodiles in Florida: —

“I had promised Dr. J. B. Holder of the American Museum of Natural History in New York to keep an eye open for his interests, and hearing reports of a large crocodile up the Bay, we went to investigate.

“We had only recently realized [1886] that the brackish waters of this part of the coast harbored real crocodiles, quite distinct from the alligators, who confine themselves to the fresh water. In fact, the two keep strictly to their own bailiwicks, usually fighting savagely if they chance to meet.

“We found his lordship in Arch Creek, a short distance from its mouth, sunning himself on the south bank, and made several vain attempts to net him. Finally I got the grains into his neck and he went to the bottom in eight feet of water, with his head under a ledge. We got two other lines around his tail, bent over a large sapling, made the lines fast to it, and left him for the night.

“Next morning he had tired of holding against the strain and was out on clear bottom. Another line was slipped over his head, and then, taking turns around the fore and main masts of the Kingfish, we began heaving in. That fool reptile, with strength and jaws able to tear the little boat into kindling wood, never did a thing until we had him too short alongside to get a lick at us, and then something was doing every minute for the next half-hour, until he was exhausted. Rolling up the lines, he would almost capsize the sharpie, while Charley Peacock and I climbed out on the other side. Then, finding that his teeth were gouging chunks out of her cedar planking, I got a rope-yarn slip-noose ready, and watching for a chance, got it around his jaws. This seemed to discourage him and he lay quiet.

“So we had him alive; but what should we do with him? Had we known that there was a buyer in New York ready to give thousands for one of his size, 14 feet 8 inches, we would soon have had him in a crate and on the way. But thinking of the Museum, and a previous experience when an eight-foot crocodile, supposedly dead, had come to life in a twelve-foot skiff, and came within an ace of throwing three of us overboard in a crocodile-hole where I had seen twenty at once, we finally concluded that the only good crocodile was a dead one. So we ended his career with a rifle-ball and after much rigging of purchases got him aboard. He weighed close to 1,200 pounds.”

But while crocodiles are rare they are by no means all gone, and my brother Robert, who lives at Golden Beach, just north of Miami Beach, and whose place backs up against an inland waterway, went down to his dock one day and saw a crocodile in the water right at his feet. The water was clear and he could see every scale on the monster, which he assures me has been seen on many occasions during the last five or six years. It is called Moby Dick by his neighbors, and he believes that the animal is at least twelve feet long.

That means that crocodiles in Florida years ago grew to be larger than the alligators, at least in this part of the state. The crocodiles occupy only a small area in the upper Keys and around the coast of the southeastern section of the state, but at one time they extended as far north as the Indian River — though they were extremely rare. Their extermination has been due partly to hide-hunting and partly to their capture for sales to zoological gardens and menageries. The eggs are often gathered and hatched artificially, but the tiny hatchlings are vicious the moment they emerge from the egg, and never get tame as little alligators do.

Since crocodiles in Florida are strictly nocturnal at the present time, there are probably far more of them scattered about in the Keys than most people suspect. But if I wanted to find a crocodile tomorrow, I should in no wise be sure of having my wish granted.

2

IN MANY parts of the world, crocodiles are still greatly feared by man. A number of those that I shot in the delta of the Ganges had bangles and bracelets in their stomachs. The ornaments may have come from corpses floating down river. Many Hindus are too poor to afford the wood necessary for complete cremation, and throw the remains into the river. In the Ganges delta, and in the lower reaches of the river near the Bay of Bengal, one constantly sees corpses floating by, usually ridden by a crow or two. They are picked at as well by the great softshelled turtles, and no doubt frequently consumed by crocodiles. But it is also certain that crocodiles lurk near the places where women come to dip up water, and near fords where men must cross streams.

The American species of crocodile has never been so belligerent as some of the Oriental forms, and today the beasts that are found in Florida around the southern tip of the peninsula and among the Keys are, as I have indicated, so shy and retiring that many people scarcely know of their existence.

To show what the alligator once was, I shall quote from William Bartram’s Travels, the best contemporary source. We must remember that Bartram uses the words “crocodile” and “alligator” interchangeably.

Bartram records: “The noise of the crocodiles kept me awake the greater part of the night; but when I arose in the morning, contrary to my expectations, there was perfect peace; very few of them to be seen, and those were asleep on the shore. Yet I was not able to suppress my fears and apprehensions of being attacked by them in future; and indeed yesterday’s combat with them, notwithstanding I came off in a manner victorious, or at least made a safe retreat, had left sufficient impression on my mind to damp my courage; and it seemed too much for one of my strength, being alone in a very small boat, to encounter such collected danger.”

The prospect of “running the gauntlet” farther up the river, Bartram says, was almost more than he could contemplate. But he resolved to continue his journey for one day more. He goes on: —

“Accordingly I got everything on board, charged my gun, and set sail, cautiously, along shore. As I passed by Battle lagoon, I began to tremble and keep a good look-out; when suddenly a huge alligator rushed out of the reeds, and with a tremendous roar came up, and darted as swift as an arrow under my boat, emerging upright on my lee quarter, with open jaws, and belching water and smoke that fell upon me like rain in a hurricane. I laid soundly about his head with my club, and beat him off; and after plunging and darting about my boat, he went off on a straight line through the water, seemingly with the rapidity of lightning, and entered the cape of the lagoon.”

Bartram proceeded, but he adds with good reason that he “could not forbear looking now and then behind me.” And sure enough, he soon spotted another one coming up: —

“The water of the river hereabouts was shoal and very clear; the monster came up with the usual roar and menaces, and passed close by the side of my boat, when I could distinctly see a young brood of alligators, to the number of one hundred or more, following after her in a long train. They kept close together in a column, without straggling off to the one side or the other; the young appeared to be of an equal size, about fifteen inches in length, almost black, with pale yellow transverse waved clouds or blotches, much like rattlesnakes in colour. I now lost sight of my enemy again. . . .

“The alligator when full grown is a very large and terrible creature, and of prodigious strength, activity and swiftness in the water. I have seen them twenty feet in length, and some are supposed to be twenty-two or twenty-three feet. Their body is as large as that of a horse; their shape exactly resembles that of a lizard, except their tail, which is flat or cuneiform, being compressed on each side, and gradually diminishing from the abdomen to the extremity, which, with the whole body, is covered with horny plates or squamae, impenetrable when on the body of the live animal, even to a rifle ball, except, about their head and just behind their forelegs or arms, where it is said they are only vulnerable. The head of a full grown one is about three feet, and the mouth opens nearly the same length; their eyes are small in proportion, and seem sunk deep in the head, by means of the prominency of the brows; the nostrils are large, inflated and prominent on the top, so that the head in the water resembles, at a distance, a great chunk of wood floating about.”

Bartram took a particular interest in the jaws of the creature: “In the forepart of the upper jaw, on each side, just under the nostrils, are two very large, thick, strong teeth or tusks, not very sharp, but rather the shape of a cone: these are as white as the finest polished ivory, and are not covered by any skin or lips, and always in sight, which gives the creature a frightful appearance: in the lower jaw are holes opposite to these teeth, to receive them: when they clap their jaws together it causes a surprising noise, like that which is made by forcing a heavy plank with violence upon the ground, and may be heard at a great distance.

“But what is yet more surprising to a stranger, is the incredible loud and terrifying roar, which they are capable of making, especially in the spring season, their breeding time. It most resembles very heavy distant thunder, not only shaking the air and waters, but causing the earth to tremble; and when hundreds and thousands are roaring at the same time, you can scarcely be persuaded but that the whole globe is violently and dangerously agitated.”

You will note that Bartram speaks of alligators of a far larger size than anything which we know today. I have seen a specimen thirteen feet long in captivity, and the Agassiz Museum has a skull from an individual that was thirteen and a half feet long — the largest in my experience. This large alligator was shot by H. C. Eyer in the Sebastian River in 1888. Eyer was a taxidermist who lived at Rockledge, sixteen miles north of Eau Gallie. I saw this skull first ten years after he had shot the animal, and tried hard to procure it for my collection. Mr. Eyer declined to part with it. I pestered him from time to time and then completely lost track of him when he moved north. Then, to my delight, in 1923 he wrote me that he was giving me the skull.

There is, however, no reason to conclude that Bartram exaggerated. Consider this parallel: Paul de la Gironiere tells what is certainly a true story in his Twenty Years in the Philippine Islands (Harper & Brothers, 1854); he describes how in 1825 he, with Mr. George R. Russell of Boston, killed a giant crocodile, a fearful creature that for years had taken a heavy toll of human lives near a much used ford in a stream near Lake Taal in Luzon. The crocodile was twenty-seven feet long and eleven feet around the body behind the forelimbs. Simple mathematical computation and careful comparison with the skulls of other crocodiles of which we have complete skeletons, and hence know the exact length, prove that this animal must indeed have been nearly thirty feet long. This skull was brought home by Mr. Russell. I have it now here in the Agassiz Museum. It pleases me that today what I believe to be the largest alligator skull in the world is on exhibition beside what I know to be the largest crocodile skull.

No such crocodile exists today anywhere in the Orient; hence there is no reason to doubt that Bartram, writing years before the killing of our Philippine monster, encountered alligators quite as large and quite as ferocious as those he described.

3

AS A boy I was thrilled to hear the gators bellow in spring in the St. Johns marsh at Lake Washington, one of the great centers of gator hunting. They were abundant then. In recent years I have gone to the “Cabbage Mound” at evening and listened and have never heard more than a few scattered animals calling. One used to hear a chorus.

At Gainesville, on Bevins Arm, my friends the Dickinsons have a house right on the south shore of this sanctuary. Here the gators have been protected for years, and Lucy Dickinson, who is alone there at night with her small son, her husband being in the Navy, tells me that on occasion the ground fairly trembles with her saurian neighbors’ bellowing. I went out on several evenings to hear what I could hear. A northwest breeze sprang up, the air cooled, but all was silent. There are few places left in all of Florida where a real gator chorus can still be heard.

Most people do not know that alligators may be “called.” Of course old reptiles which have been chivied or shot at are shy, but little gators and big gators in wild, remote localities, where they have had little to do with man, come to the grunt, sometimes repeatedly. The call is made by holding your nose and croaking rather like a frog. The sound is indescribable but is not at all difficult to imitate.

One of the most characteristic features of Florida is the needle-grass pond of the open piney-woods prairie. These are the special haunt of the sandhill crane, for it is in the middle of one of these ponds that it builds its nest, where the water is perhaps a foot deep, and here it raises its young. These little bodies of water all have a hard bottom and one may wade there at will.

If you will look every one of these pools over carefully, you will see perhaps two or three tufts of vegetation sticking up above the level of the grass and rushes, which differ markedly from anything else to be seen. These little patches will consist of Pontederia, spatterdock, and blue pickerel weed. They mark gator dens, and I imagine that they are very, very old. The gator scoops out a hole of some considerable depth and in one side of this hole he forms his cave, a refuge where he may retire for rest by day or during cold weather. Detritus and probably the excrement of the alligator in time give a different character to the soil at the bottom of the hole, so that these special plants gradually come to grow there.

The old-time crackers, who love to hunt gators in these prairie ponds, take an iron rod about the size of your little finger and sharpened at one end and, as they say, “proag” down a foot or two back from the pickerel weeds in the sand. As soon as they touch the gator they can feel him move about, and usually he will grab the iron rod with his teeth. Then the gator hook is brought into play. This is a hook, two to three inches across, which does not need to be sharp, on a long pole.

After a good deal of feeling around, one can work this hook down into the gator’s burrow until he grabs it. Then with a steady pull he can be drawn out, for he leads easily when the hook is set behind the symphysis of his lower jaws. Now walk him straight ashore while the surprise period lasts. Disengage the hook and grab his bill. The muscles for opening his jaws are very weak, and if you act quickly he still will be surprised and unresistant and you can put a noose around his bill and make it fast around his neck. Hurry then, or have an efficient helper, and you can get his forelegs and hind legs and hitch them together over his back before he begins to thrash about. Sometimes they never do thrash about, but sometimes they are hard to handle until you make them fast to a pole.

4

FRANK CARLISLE, who taught me all T know about gator hunting, went out with me one day after we had promised to get three good-sized gators to put in the pond in the lawn of the Miami Aquarium, which had just been opened at Miami Beach. Mr. John Harris, a friend of my father, asked to go along and we set out to visit some ponds inland from Lake Worth where we had seen signs that gators had been walking around on the sandy shores. We finally got a gator about seven feet long, tied him up, and put him in the back of my beach wagon, from which the rear seat had been removed. We drove around to a number of other ponds, where we found that the gators were not at home, and we decided the time had come to boil a pot of grits and get dinner.

I stopped the car at a likely-looking shady spot where there was some dry wood, and Frank jumped out of the car and walked around to get the cooking gear, which was all nested together in a very compact and convenient container. By some hook or crook, that gator had managed to get rid of his bridle, and as Frank was reaching into the back of the car the gator made a snap. I can hear now the way his jaws chugged as they met together on Frank’s elbow.

Now Frank was an old hand in the woods and he kept his head. He knew that if that gator began to whirl, it would wring his arm off in a jiffy. He always called me Dad. He said, “Dad, step in the back of the car as quick as you can.” I did. I had sneakers on my bare feet and was able to get a good hold with my toes on the sides of the alligator’s jaws and then, gripping the tip of his snout with both hands, I pulled the jaws apart. Frank got clear.

The question then was how in the devil I was going to rid myself of the gator. But the sand was soft and I just let go everything and threw myself on my side on the ground beside the car. I then took the gator hook, pulled the gator clear of the car, and shot him behind the front leg with a charge of bird shot. We left him right there, picked up our gear, and drove as fast as a crooked sand road would allow to a drugstore in Lake Worth. There were two lines of holes made by the gator’s teeth across Frank’s forearm near the elbow and two on his upper arm. The druggist, with a toothpick with cotton wrapped about its tip, pushed iodine down into each hole. The iodine did the business and no infection set in.

Subsequently we took a gator home and made it fast to a tree in the yard, for we wanted two more before we started for Miami. We got them in due season and took them to the Aquarium, although one gator, while we had him awaiting the journey, almost played some mischief, for he had scope enough to his rope to get in close to the hedge which surrounded our place at Palm Beach. He evidently wanted shade. At any rate, he was almost jumped on by our paper boy, who took a short cut and leaped over the hedge with no idea that he would almost land on a good-sized gator. He was terrified, but the gator was bridled and I don’t think he actually hit the boy, though he could thrash around with his tail pretty nimbly.

We got a piano box, took both back seats out of the truck, and drove the three reptiles in the box down to the Miami Aquarium and turned them loose in the pool. They had managed to do considerable damage to each other in the course of the trip as they didn’t like the joggling of the car. Gators, however, have rapidly healing flesh; and so far as I know, they lived in their new home until the Aquarium was sold out and abandoned.

Of course this method of catching alligators is not the one employed by the commercial gator hunters. It is the method used in securing live animals to supply the number of alligator farms to which admission is paid by the winter visitors and from which zoological parks, circuses, and other institutions are supplied with live animals.

Commercial gator hunting is carried on entirely at night. In times of high water the hunters push their long, narrow, and, I may add, very light and ticklish skiffs through the bonnet beds and around the edges of the lakes and through the pools of open water in the big marshes. The gator’s eyes are “shined” with a headlight and the animal is shot, sometimes to be killed outright, and more often stunned with a charge of heavy shot. Then it is drawn to the surface with a gator hook and dispatched, either with a long-handled hatchet or with a heavy machete.

Gators from four to seven feet long furnish the highest-priced hides, but much smaller ones are also killed, their skins making pocketbooks, cigarette cases, and similar novelties. Many of the old giants were killed either for sheer deviltry or because they were supposed to be destructive of younger and hence more valuable gators — for by common repute they are cannibals. If there was a convenient tussock or mound of high land at hand to which the gators could be hauled and piled up during the night, so that repeated trips could be made, the number of animals killed in a single night’s hunt was sometimes very large indeed. This killing, carried on year after year all over the state, has made the reptiles rare and they are now relatively seldom seen.

To be sure, there are enough in the various socalled alligator farms to repopulate the state if there were money available to buy them up and turn them loose. I believe there is still enough seed left to ensure that the animal will not become extinct. The slaughter still continues even though gator hunting is prohibited in certain counties of the state. For the moment, at least, the scarcity and the high cost of ammunition are giving the animals a welcome respite. I am informed, however, that at the Gainesville hide brokerage about 80,000 skins are received each year. But the more gators are hunted, the more shy and secretive they become, and it is almost impossible to conceive of the possibility that in a big marsh every last animal could be killed.