JamieSue

A Gator Gitter

Something had to be done about our little nuisance alligator. When I kayaked in the morning, he appeared near the shore. When I kayaked in the afternoon, he appeared in the center of the slough. Once, as I circled our slough, I had a not-so-subtle string of bubbles following behind me.  So, I dug out the alligator-permit-pack which had arrived in the mail and scanned down the list of approved alligator hunters included in the packet. There were two pages of hunters and though fancy marketing business names such as “Critter Gitter” intrigued me, I was trying to be logical and just pick the closest list entry near my home. One person was listed in Alcolu, so I called and left a message on an answering machine. After two days and no call back, I called “Gamecock Exterminating” in Sumter. I explained the situation of the nuisance alligator and the lady who answered the phone said, “Well ma’am. I’m not sure we handle alligators.”  “But you’re on the list,” I explained and she put me on hold. A few minutes later a man picked up the phone.

Him: “You need to know what to do about a gator?”
Me: “Yes sir. I have a permit to kill it, but I don’t know how to do that.”
Him: “You don’t know how to kill the alligator?”
Me: “Right”
Him: “Oh, well girl,  that’s easy. You just get a boat, a spotlight, and you go out at night, point the light at the gator til you see his red eyes, and then you shoot it.”
Me: “I don’t have a gun.”
Him: (pause) “Can you barie one?” (translation: barrow)
Me: “I don’t know how to shoot a gun.”
Him: (longer pause filled with disappointment for my failure) “Oh.  Well, let me have someone call you back.”

Later that afternoon, a man from Gamecock Exterminating called back and explained that he had only recently started hunting gators. He’d charge $150 to shoot it plus about $30 a trip for gas if he couldn’t get it on the first go. He tells me so far he has had three gator calls and on two of those he never even saw the gator and on the last call, he wasn’t able to get the gator he did see. This didn’t exactly reassure me. Especially at $30 a trip.

Luckily, even later that afternoon, the no-call-back man from Alcolu, my original contact, called back. We talked about “my gator” and he said he’d like to come down that evening and check it out.  I asked how much he’d charge me to kill the gator.

Him:  “Far as money goes, it ain’t goin to cost you no ten thousand bucks or nothing. You’re basically just paying for my gas. This is somethin me and my girlfriend just like to do together.”
Me: “Well, great.”  (thinking: he and his girlfriend like to kill alligators together??)
Him: “I’m coming back from work now and I’ll just stop by my home and grab something to eat and I’ll bring my girlfriend  out with me or if she can’t come I’ll grab one of my boys to come out there with me.  I’ll be there tonight.”

A few hours later, right about dusk, the Alcolu gator hunter arrived and my expectations were not disappointed.  He arrived in a pickup truck complete with Confederate Flag window decal and a sticker of a beautiful dear with the phrase “If it’s brown, it’s down.”  He was a thick man, mid 30s, and he wore a camouflage shirt, khaki shorts with many pockets, and flipflops. His girlfriend was not with him and I was truly saddened not to  meet her, the woman with the gator killing hobby. But he had brought along a boy - a skinny school kid in a wife beater, jeans, and cowboy boots. The truck bed carried a camouflage boat so small there was room only for one person to kneel inside. The boat looked homemade.

This gator hunter was not a novice. He had been catching gators as a volunteer for the last three years and he had plenty of stories.

Him:  “An alligator he just loves a red cork. I got one gator round at Potato Creek that you can throw that red cork and he’ll bring it right back on shore to you and I thought, ‘Dang I got me a retriever.’ Course, it’s not good to do that and feed the alligators.” 

As we walked down toward the lake to “get a lay of the land”, I had good feelings.  Good feelings.

Revenge, Sweet Revenge

I didn’t mean to get revenge. Honest. It was all just an accident. My nieces were visiting and it was a nice summer day. I took them out in the lake for a ride in the jon boat and kayak and as we were  paddling about I spotted a small turtle sunning on a log in the weedier end of our slough. I told the nieces to be quiet and we paddled sneakily toward the turtle so I could point him out to my youngest niece. “See him? No, right there. On the left. On the top of the log.” And then the boat was floating right by him. He plopped off of the log into the water and before I knew what was happening my 10-year-old instincts had taken over and my hand was shooting out from my body as I lunged forward to snag the turtle from the shallows.

The summer I was 10, I kept 23 turtles in a cardboard box in my closet. My parents didn’t know.  I considered it a humanitarian effort (and yes, very fun). My next door neighbor, a retired Southern Baptist preacher and fisherman, considered it his responsibility to catch our local turtles and dispatch them by dropping a concrete cinder block on their shells. They deserved it. After all, they stole his bait. So, my response to his ethnic cleansing was the collection in my closet.  23 turtles.
Old habits die hard. As I continued to paddle around the lake with my nieces we spotted another hatchling sized turtle on another log. Rinse. Repeat. So we had two turtles, Yellow Belly Sliders,  dubbed Rocky and Squirt, crawling around with us in the boat. When we got back to the house, I put them in a small fishbowl and we set up a little habitat with rocks and plants. My youngest niece had detailed conversations with them about what they liked and didn’t like and how they were feeling to confirm that they were indeed happy. I remember those turtle-conversing days, but times and imagination have changed: my niece informed me that the turtles would like to have a computer in their tank, certainly something I wouldn’t have imagined back in my day. Or, perhaps turtles have simply become more demanding.

The little turtle bowl was meant to be a few day project for the kids. But of course, I got attached. The turtles graduated to a full size tank with a filter, a log, plants, and the addition of small fish caught from the lake. Rocky and Squirt can be adorable. They stretch their long green necks up toward the light. They swim over to the side of the tank when I walk up. They like to dive from the log into the waterfall caused by the filter. And they yawn, adorably, underwater.  But don’t let them fool you, there is a darker side to turtle personas.

And this is where my revenge, my guilt, my glee come in to play.  At this age, turtles are very hungry and especially carnivorous (Feed Me, Seymour). I comply to their needs and catch crickets, frogs, beetles, and bugs for them. It’s not a difficult job. I live on a lake in a state that is humid, green, and wet. There is no shortage of bugs. All I need to do is turn on the porch light at night, wait an hour, and collect some creepy crawlies off the screen door. Most of these creatures are dead by the time I drop them in the tank and the turtles rush to crunch and tug at their endoskeletons to get to the meat.  Then, one night, I stepped onto the deck during another slug invasion. Slugs. Turtles. Slugs. Turtles. Hmmm.  You can see where this is going.

I convince myself that this is the natural order of things. Far better than just stomping the slugs. Certainly. I’m not senselessly killing them. I am delivering them to the turtles to be…well, sensefully killed.  I place a slug on the floating log in the aquarium, and…  do you remember that scene in Jurassic Park with the goat tied to the tree in the TRex enclosure? It’s exactly like that, but stickier. The slug is relieved to be out of my fingers. He unfurls his body and begins to make his way, innocently, along the log. The tank probably seems pretty and peaceful to him. Damp. Woody. A few floating plants. The relaxing sound of water. Meanwhile, Rocky’s small green head appears in the water at the other end of the tank. He makes his approach as stealthily as an awkward Susan B Anthony Coin with legs can be stealthy. Rocky uses his front legs to pull himself ever so slightly up onto the log and then at top speed his neck extends and his mouth closes on the soft, delicious, unprotected body of the slug. Rocky retreats from the log, slug in mouth, and I watch as he eats him happily underwater. The eating is not as straightforward as I would like. Slugs, as I have mentioned previously, are slimy. Rocky does not like the slime so as he consumes the slug there is a slow process of coughing back up the slug slime and tugging it from his mouth with his claws. It is not pleasant and the water turns gray from slug guts. However, slugs are by far clearly the turtle’s favorite food. If only one slug is in the tank, it becomes a game of tug of war. Tug of Slug.

I, of course, only feed these slugs to the turtles out of necessity. Like Seymour, I offer up the sacrifice because what else am I to do.  The turtles are growing and hungry. They need substance.  Of course, this has nothing to do with revenge on the slugs. I am not pleased at this turn of events. I don’t do a little happy dance near the tank. I don’t cheer “GO Rocky Go!” I don’t take bets on the slug/turtle death match.  Certainly, I never watch the slaughter. I choose to avert my eyes. And, I never, ever take pictures of it.

Alligator Fast Food

I’m sitting on my porch with my camera to take cheesy pictures of Cardinals at the bird feeder. Sweet. Innocent. Low stress photography. A slight breeze is blowing. It’s early morning and not yet sweltering hot. I’m rocking just a bit on the swing. All is right with the world. And then I see the alligator. He is not hanging out in the weeds. He is not floating in the middle of the slough. He is not basking on the weedy opposite bank on the allowed side of our agreed upon truce line. No. He is floating, full body exposed, exactly where I swim every single day. The nerve!  Just yesterday evening I was in that very spot, loudly raking rocks up out of the lake, making a giant alligator-scaring ruckus, yet there he is now,  happily floating in the sun. That cad!

I begin taking photographic proof of his truce-breaking behavior. He is swimming lazily toward my beach when suddenly his back lowers under the surface of the water so that only his head is barely exposed and he becomes perfectly still. He is laying in wait. He is ready to pounce. He is hunting. He is PRECISELY where I was working on the edge of the water just yesterday. What prey exactly is he waiting FOR? I wonder this in a slightly panicky high-pitched voice. Is he waiting for me?

I walk down to the lower section of our deck, still taking pictures, when movement on the sand draws my attention. A gigantic oft-shell turtle is on our beach. He makes the beach look small. I’m not exaggerating. His shell is at least two feet wide and his neck is as big around as my forearm. Pardon me, I mean: Her shell is at least two feet wide and her neck is as big around as my forearm. I know it is a Her because she is flipping sand into the air around her – part of the egg laying process. She watches me closely and I’m thrilled for a second, before I remember the alligator laying in wait at the shore. I take some pictures and try to devise any way of scaring the alligator without first scaring the turtle but then a noisy car goes by on the street and the turtle is startled. She takes off toward the water. The alligator lunges forward and I’m terrified by his speed. My brain knew gators are fast but my body had forgotten, being around them so often. When I see how fast the gator crosses the 10 feet of shallows between him and the turtle, I feel sick to my stomach with fear. The gator scrambles on to shore. The turtle runs at an angle toward the water. The gator turns and his tail cracks against my small metal john boat making a loud ringing noise. I run toward the beach, but by the time I get there, of course, the turtle and alligator are gone. The water is brown with stirred up sand. I stand on the pier, watching the water for the gator, when just beyond our neighbor’s pier, the turtle surfaces. She was not been caught and I am happy.

I walk to where she had been digging. The top layer of sand is disturbed and I dig gently through it. The sand underneath is extremely hard packed, so much so that I can not dig through it with just my hands.  I think that the turtle must have been scared off before she even began laying so I go back up to the house. As soon as I get back inside, I see some black Crows land on the beach and nose around, investigating, I think, for exposed turtle eggs.  I fix lunch and sit down at the table to eat when I see one of the massive black crows fly up from the beach with an egg in its mouth. I run back down to the sand and discover proof that the crows are much smarter than I am. The birds have dug a hole that is six inches deep and almost large enough for my hand. At the bottom of their hole rest the eggs. I fill in the hole and I turn a wheelbarrow over on the sand to protect the eggs from the birds. In fifty-five to eighty-five days (thanks Google!) we’ll have a lot more soft-shelled turtles, I hope. It was an amazing morning – all started sitting on the swing on my porch. I can’t even be clever or witty in writing about what I saw. It made me feel lucky to be living, again, among creatures, plants, and water instead of cabs and sidewalks. But I don’t want to push my luck – that afternoon I re-investigate the alligator permit situation. I won’t forget that remarkable speed and the sound of the gator’s tail against my metal john boat any time soon. Poor Mr. Gator needs to go.

Slug Hurling

I have a slug problem. A slug proliferation. A slug infiltration. They live in the roots of all my hanging plants. After a  rain they appear in massive slug regiments marching their way up my white planters. They leave long glistening slug trails behind them across the deck to taunt me. They are not afraid. They know they outnumber me. Something had to be done.

Because I don’t like to kill creatures, I began my anti-slug campaign with a slug relocation program. After a rain, and it rains every afternoon here during the summer, I went out onto the deck, plucked the slugs from the planters and threw them off of the deck and out into the yard.  A one-woman slug Olympic event. Slug hurling. Have you ever picked up a slug? When you close your fingers around them they harden their slimey little bodies to make it more difficult for you to get them and this often results in said slug falling into your palm or rolling around between your thumb and forefinger or perhaps into the sleeve of your shirt coating your skin with a gluey, slick wet substance that is more disgusting than phlegm. Next, go try to wash off the slug juice, I dare you. Soap just makes it slimier.  Your only option is to wipe the slug juice off sternly with a paper towel and then pretend that you do not notice the hard dry platelet left attached to your skin. It’s like having dried crazy glue on your fingertips.  Unpleasant, to say the least. The slug hurling event required serious strength of will.  But then, after weeks of my slug tossing competitions, while I was transplanting a fern on the downstairs deck, I discovered an entire slug colony (shown in the pictures) in the base of the planter. It seemed all the slugs I had been tossing into the yard were only matriculating back into the downstairs planters.  My slug handling was all for naught.

“Salt,” someone told me. “Just pour salt on them.”  Again, after a rain, I snuck out on the deck, salt shaker held maliciously in one hand, I crept up on a slug , and sprinkled him.  To my horror, the slug began to writhe as its sluggy body reverted slowly to its basic chemical makeup. My lord, the horror of that. I could practically hear his screams of, “I’m melting! I’m melting! I’ll get you and your little dog too!”

The final step was, quite literally a step. I stomp the slugs. Every evening, a minor Slime RiverDance happens on my deck. Each slug makes an audible pop under my sandal and leaves enough goo to cause me to slide the next day when I put my shoes on. They leave wet streaks on the deck where they came to their untimely, but quick, deaths.  This final method has, largely, worked well. I can, however, give one final piece of advice. If, let’s suppose, you are coming up the stairs barefoot one evening and by chance you see a slug in your normal stomping ground, don’t let slug-stomping instinct overtake you. Do not, under any circumstances, ever stomp a slug barefooted.  Trust me.  Just trust me.