The Best of Ellijay, Blue Ridge & Jasper Funpaper issue 7 | Page 9

Story By Bayou Betty
Photos By Bayou Betty
& Kimbie Dismuke Brown

L

ong before the days of Swamp People and The Gator Boys coming into our living rooms on a weekly
basis, I had an appreciation for alligators. Being a kid from South Georgia and growing up in the country with the woods as my playground, I learned very early on to always keep a look out for alligators, especially when I was playing in or near the water, or even in a swimming pool. I remember one summer an
alligator ate my cousin's dog. I think I was fifteen at the time and it was my first encounter with how aggressive the apex predators really are. And though the cold blooded creatures never ended up in our pool, several ended up in my cousin Scott's pool. Scott and his family lived in a very low lying area in Jeff Davis
County which isn't too far from Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp. They had built a house behind my grandmother's house and right in front of a two acre lily pad pond. The pond was fed by a black creek and a
momma alligator became quite fond of using the pond for a few months out of the year as her egg laying
spot. The baby alligators would hatch and many would find their way from the pond and into the swimming
pool. Although I thought a gator pool was a nice addition to the property, the family eventually had to fill in
the pool during the late 80’s as alligators were still on the protected list due to the over harvesting in the 50's
and 60's.
Now sometime around 2000, the baby alligators had flourished so much that my cousin Scott asked me if I
could help him relocate all the babies. He had found the perfect bait and it worked great on the 10 to 12 inch
baby alligators. It was a plastic floating bobber that blinked. The little gators couldn't resist this flashing
ball and would chase it down clamping onto it with their bigger-than-body jaws. My job would be fishing the
gators hookless just using the bobber while Scott's job was to unlatch their jaws and put them in the back of
his pickup truck. We managed to catch and relocate about 25 or so just down the road behind my aunt's
house. She lived off the same creek but near a lot more flowing water. Though I never saw the momma of all
these gator babies, Scott believed it was the same one that consumed his dog so many years before.
I had never really given any thought to hunting much of anything until that moment. But I thought of this
reptile like she was some sort of rogue killer, you know, something like Jaws, striking terror in the backyards
of South Georgia. However, pursuing gators would have to wait. Hunting alligators in Georgia is strictly regulated by zones and you must apply for a Georgia alligator tag and obtain an alligator hunting license before
you can harvest an alligator. Nowadays if you have a problem with a nuisance alligator, you can call a state
agency to come out to help as long as the alligator is over 4 feet in length. The Georgia alligator hunting season is one month and usually lasts from the first week in September until the first week in October.
My first opportunity to go on a big gator hunt finally presented itself this past season. A friend's husband,
Patrick Brown, had a tag and his eye on an aggressive 13 foot plus beast. The land owner said the big gators
were depleting the fish and duck populations as well as killing the small alligators in this Emanuel County
back water pond. This would be my first real hunting experience and I was going to film it. Before I headed
out I needed to successfully complete a hunter’s safety course, and then apply for my hunting license along
with the alligator permit. I passed with a solid B. Thanks, I'll take it!
I joined Patrick's crew for several of the night h չ