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Brad Taylor
Batesville-based river guide Brad Taylor knows where to look for gators.
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On the ride up the North Santee River, Megan Cline, far right, and her husband Travis, center, get a briefing on alligator hunting techniques from assistant guide Mike Roland.
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Assistant guide Mike Roland holds the spotlight for Megan Cline as she subdues the injured but still-fighting gator.
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Brad Taylor wrestles the harvested gator onto the boat.
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Cline poses with her 8 foot, 2 inch trophy.
A slender shaft of bright green light cuts through the darkness and falls on the armored shoulders of an American alligator. The animal does not know it, of course, but the light is coming from the laser sights of a compound crossbow held by Megan Cline, a hunter who plans, in the next few seconds, to loose an arrow that she hopes will lodge soundly beneath the gator’s thick hide.
For two months now, ever since she received word that she was one of 1,200 hunters issued a state permit to kill an alligator in South Carolina, Cline has been anxiously anticipating this moment.
And now, at just before 2 a.m. on a Friday in mid-September, seated on the bow of her hunting guide’s 22-foot flat-bottomed boat somewhere along the North Santee River, the moment has arrived.
Cline breathes easy, presses the stock of the crossbow against her shoulder and then squeezes the trigger. The arrow snaps forward into the night—but the shot is maybe an inch or so too high and passes over the alligator’s back.
For a few moments, Cline is nonplussed. Did she unconsciously jerk the trigger at the last moment? Maybe the alligator moved unexpectedly and she didn’t notice. But before she can determine exactly what happened, the gator slowly slips beneath the surface of the river and swims safely away.
Blame it on Swamp People
A month earlier, in Moncks Corner, wildlife biologist Jay Butfiloski of the S.C. Department of Natural Resources, stepped to a lectern to talk about all things alligator to a room filled with hunters. The meeting was the first of three such sessions he would lead around the state prior to the opening of the month-long 2011 alligator hunting season.
Around the back walls of the auditorium, vendors—hunting guides, meat processors, taxidermists and merchants selling equipment unique to alligator hunting—tended to tables displaying their wares and services. One vendor even offered up samples of deep-fried alligator meat.
Butfiloski told the crowd that some 6,400 people from 42 states and Canada applied for a permit to hunt and kill an alligator in 2011—a 70 percent increase from the previous year.
“I have only one guess,” he says, speculating on the reason behind the spike in applications. “And that is the popularity of Swamp People.” The biologist was referring to the History Channel’s highly-rated reality television series that follows the adventures of Cajun alligator hunters in Louisiana’s sprawling Atchafalaya Swamp.
First-time gator hunters in South Carolina are often surprised by the differences between the commercial hunt portrayed on the show and the realities of tracking down and killing a single animal in the wetlands of the Palmetto State. Shooting at reptiles from a distance and setting baited hooks, to cite two examples, are not approved recreational hunting techniques.
“What you see on Swamp People is a highly commercialized activity,” Butfiloski says. “They can do a lot of things in Louisiana that we can’t do here. What we do in South Carolina is more of a recreational opportunity.”
Another striking difference is in alligator populations. While Louisiana is home to some 2 million of the ancient reptiles, South Carolina’s population is closer to just 100,000 animals, spread throughout the state’s coastal plain. DNR divides alligator country into four hunting regions—the Midlands, Middle Coast, Southern Coastal and the Pee Dee—and it is in these areas that life for the alligator begins, humbly enough, inside an egg laid by its mother sometime during the month of June. The female alligator lays anywhere from 20 to 60 eggs in a mound-like nest built from mud and grass.
After incubating for about two months, the baby alligators break through their shells and begin peeping, sounds that prompt the mother gator to tear open the nest and meet her progeny for the first time. At birth, each baby alligator is about 10 inches long and is black with yellow stripes, temporary markings that will eventually fade away. The youngsters will spend the next two or three years with their mother before venturing off on their own and, if lucky, will grow to be longer than 13 feet, weigh in excess of 1,000 pounds and live for a half-century or more.
Hunters, of course, prefer large trophy animals, and South Carolina has a reputation for big gators. During the 2010 hunting season, a woman from Massachusetts made national headlines when she killed an alligator in Lake Moultrie that measured 13 feet, 6 inches and weighed in at 1,025 pounds. The record gator taken in South Carolina during the 2011 season, was a 900-pound monster from the Cooper River that also measured more than 13 feet in length.
On the hook
South Carolina alligator hunts are normally conducted at night from boats that skirt the edges of lakes or rivers. In accordance with state law, hunters use powerful hand-held spotlights to locate an animal before easing their way close enough to attach a line to the gator using arrows, harpoons or rods and reels outfitted with heavy treble hooks. But the gator, of course, does not easily surrender. Once hooked, it fights the line attached to its body, shaking its head, diving or executing a number of “death rolls” in an attempt to break free. The hunter must work the line to gradually bring the alligator alongside the boat, slip a wire snare around the animal’s head and administer the coup de grace using a knife, handgun or “bang stick” at the base of the gator’s skull. Then it’s a matter of wrestling the alligator into the boat, tagging it and heading for home.
Batesburg-based river guide Brad Taylor has seen his share of big alligators over the years, and has helped hunters fill their tags since the recreational season resumed in South Carolina in 2008. To date, his clients have brought home numerous trophy gators including five animals longer than 12 feet.
Now, it is Megan Cline’s turn. It is just after 7 p.m., with clear skies and temperatures riding easily in the mid-70s. Cline, her husband, Travis, and assistant guide Mike Roland, settle in for their journey along the North Santee River as Taylor eases the boat away from the ramp just below the Highway 17 bridge south of Georgetown.
Wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt with the image of an alligator on the back, Taylor stands at the boat’s console and pushes the throttle forward until the craft cuts through the water at exactly 18 mph. Over the sound of the boat’s Mercury engine, Taylor recounts his week: “Last night, we killed one gator that was 11 feet, 1 inch long and two nights ago we killed one that was 11 feet, 3 inches.” But he’s quick to add that there are no guarantees. Permit holders can only take a single animal, and finding the right gator takes patience, as Cline will learn over the next several hours.
Taylor throttles forward until the boat cuts through the river at full cruising speed. Just past Doar Point, he turns starboard into Six Mile Creek and settles the boat into a gentle cruising speed along the much narrower channel.
“There’s a real big gator that lives in here,” Taylor says, scanning the riverbank. “I want to see if we can get a look at him.” At about 7:30 p.m., he spots the first gator of the evening, but not the one he was hoping to see. After maybe a mile of motoring along the channel, he turns the boat around and heads back to the North Santee.
By 8 p.m., a classic coastal sunset filled with violent shades of red has finally yielded to night and now, as Taylor shines the spotlight along shore—first off the port side and then starboard—scores of alligators, their eyes shining like burning orange coals, begin to appear where before there had been only darkness.
Taylor snicks off the boat lights, cuts the main engine and uses a small electric trolling motor fitted to the port bow to navigate slowly and silently. The hunt begins in earnest as Cline takes a seat in the captain’s chair on the starboard bow, her compound crossbow at the ready.
A long night’s journey
Shortly after 9 p.m., an orange moon appears in the eastern sky. A breeze rises, tugging lightly at Taylor’s shirt, as he turns the boat into another channel. The waterway gradually narrows until its width is less than 30 feet—so narrow that the hunters can hear the wind rustling through the grass. Light spilling from one side of Taylor’s spotlight hits Cline’s crossbow and casts an ominous oversized shadow of the arrow’s triangular broadhead tip against the wall of spartina grass just a few feet away.
It will be hours yet before Cline will get a clear shot at a decent-sized gator, but smaller ones are all around. At one point, a standing patch of reeds on the port side begins to move and one small alligator, maybe four or five feet long, emerges. He swims directly toward the boat, then dips below the water’s surface. Those on board can hear and feel the gator’s bump-like scales, called scoots, rake the hull.
At 10:30 p.m., as flashes of lightning fracture the darkness, another alligator—a good one, maybe 10 feet or so—appears off the starboard bow a dozen feet away. Cline shoulders the bow and hits a button that turns on the green laser. She lays the beam of light on the gator’s back and is ready to pull the trigger when the reptile suddenly sinks back beneath the water’s surface.
Undaunted, Taylor and Cline continue the routine: spotlighting the shoreline in search of those glowing telltale eyes, easing the boat close enough to estimate the size of the animal—figure one foot in length for every inch between the gator’s nostrils and its eyes—and then hoping it stays still long enough to take a shot.
Other than good weather, Taylor tells his group, the key to a successful hunt is patience. “Finding the right gator can happen quick,” he says. “Or, if the animals are not feeding, you are going to have to camp out and be patient until you find the gator you want.”
Cline’s missed shot—her first of the night—comes more than three hours later near Little Crow Island. “I don’t know what happened,” she tells Taylor, as the guide recovers the tethered arrow from the river. “I thought for sure I had him.”
Cline now has been on the river for just about seven hours. She is disappointed by the missed shot and although not tired—the excitement of the hunt keeps any sign of fatigue at bay—she’s becoming concerned that the night might end without the filling of her hard-won gator tag.
But 20 minutes later, with lightning again painting the sky, her luck turns, as another alligator—Taylor thinks it may even be the same alligator that earlier dodged Cline’s arrow—is spotted floating on the surface of the river, it’s brown, cat-slit eyes taking in the approaching boat.
Again, Cline takes a deep breath and shoulders the bow. She clicks on the laser and shines the green light beam onto the gator’s back. The light wobbles just a bit, then settles, and this time when Cline pulls the trigger her aim is true and the arrow burrows deep into the alligator’s hide.
By 2:30 a.m., the alligator is dead and Cline’s plastic blue tag, No. 11217, is attached to the animal’s tale. After eight and a half hours on the North Santee River, the small band of adventurers returns to shore, where Taylor measures the gator at 8 feet, 2 inches and estimates its weight to be about 180 pounds.
“It’s not the biggest gator in the river,” Taylor tells Cline as she poses for pictures with her trophy. “But he’s all yours.”
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Gator hunting by the numbers
- 450 The number of alligators harvested during the 2011 hunting season.
- 13'6" Length of the largest gator reported during the 2011 season. That monster weighed in at more than 900 pounds and was taken from the Cooper River.
- 9'1'' Average length of all gators harvested in 2011. For the record, a gator must be at least 4 feet long to be harvested.
- $1,000 Approximate fee for an experienced hunting guide—recommended for first-time hunters.
May 1 to June 15, 2012
Application period for a 2012 alligator hunting permit from the S.C. Department of Natural Resources. A non-refundable $10 application fee is required for each application. Hunters are selected by lottery and must pay an additional $100 fee to receive a permit to take a single alligator. For additional details, visit DNR's website or call (803) 734-3609.
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Living dinosaurs
If nothing else, the American alligator—the largest reptile in North America—is a survivor. Scientists reckon that it has been around for 200 million years and walked the planet at the same time as their dinosaur cousins. And, 65 million years ago when those giant creatures were wiped out along with more than half of all animal and plant life on earth, the gator hunkered down and weathered the cataclysmic storm.
In the end, it was man that proved to be the alligator’s near undoing. Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, alligators were hunted for their skins to satisfy a widespread demand for fashionable leather goods like handbags and shoes. Unregulated killing continued unabated until populations declined to such perilous levels that government agencies stepped in to save the species from extinction.
In South Carolina killing alligators at night became illegal in the mid-1950s, and nearly a decade later, in 1964, gator hunting was shut down completely. Federal regulations also curtailed hunting until the mid 1980s when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the American alligator had fully recovered, although its “threatened” status remains to this day. South Carolina reinstated a one-month fall hunting season in 2008.
Jay Butfiloski, a wildlife biologist with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources, says one of the goals of a recreational hunting season is to prevent problems with “nuisance gators”—animals that grow dangerously large and lose their natural fear of humans. The agency is tracking the effect of the hunting season on the state’s alligator population, and while it’s still too early to draw conclusions, anecdotal evidence suggests the hunt is working.
“We have had people tell us that it’s getting harder to get up close to alligators, and that’s good—for us and the alligators,” he says.