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Florida is keeping its gator farms full by culling wild nests |
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Written by Brian Skoloff, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Friday, 18 July 2008 |
After driving their airboat into the Florida Everglades, Tuesday, July 1, 2008, Brandon Hall and Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission biologist Lindsey Hord begin to collect alligator eggs from a nest of mud and material gathered by the female alligator. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/J. Pat Carter
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IN THE EVERGLADES, Fla. - It's 7 a.m. in the marsh, and like some sort of cigar-chomping swamp cowboy, biologist Lindsey Hord is about to reach for something that could cost him a few fingers or worse if he's not careful.
It's the first day of Florida's annual alligator egg collection program, a yearly ritual to replenish stocks for the state's gator farmers.
Hord and several other airboat pilots fire up their engines and slowly glide out into a canal, voices crackling over their radios.
Thwump, thwump, thwump.
A helicopter swoops overhead - the nest spotter.
Hord roars up to a small island and peers into the brush for a nest that to the untrained eye looks like just a patch of wet dirt.
Bingo.
He kneels beside the mound, carefully pulling apart the mulch-like mass of dark, damp weeds. Over his shoulder, just a metre away, mama gator's bulbous eyes float ominously on the water's surface.
She's watching, but keeping her distance.
"Her cave is right here somewhere, that's why she's nesting here," Hord says.
He gently pulls the eggs from the dirt and swipes a line on the tops with a black marker before placing them carefully in a plastic bin lined with muck to keep them warm.
"If they're not marked and we roll them over, it'll kill the embryo," Hord says.
To some, this might seem, well, crazy.
For Hord, who helps co-ordinate alligator management in a state with more than a million of the prehistoric, toothy reptiles, it's another day at the office.
"You always have to watch your back," Hord says. "Usually, they will hiss and snap and make all kinds of noise, but I've had them just literally sneak up on me."
Each summer, scientists with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission help collect up to 40,000 eggs for 30 farmers who share in the catch.
Each farmer gets roughly 1,000 eggs for about $12 a pop, money that pays for the hunt and funds future alligator management programs.
By day's end, the crews collect more than 1,000 eggs.
Not a bad start to the roughly 20-day season.
The American alligator has made a miraculous recovery, bouncing back from the brink of extinction.
In 1967, after years of over-hunting and habitat loss, the gator was listed as an endangered species.
However, conservation efforts and hunting regulations led the federal government to pronounce the alligator fully recovered 20 years later.
Biologists say the egg collections don't harm the gator population, since a typical female lays about 35 eggs, the reptiles can reproduce for 25 years and they only need a few viable babies apiece to keep their numbers healthy.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 18 July 2008 )
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