Gators have a knack for adapting, surviving
Passengers aboard steamdriven paddle-wheelers slowly picking a path along narrow, snag-littered Buffalo Bayou on the way to or from the mudcaked, malarial excuse for a town that was nascent Houston in the 1830s and ’40s sometimes passed the time by unlimbering rifles and taking shots at alligators sunning on the banks of the jungle-like waterway.
There was no shortage of such targets, according to multiple accounts from the city’s early days. The bayou, like so many fresh and brackish waterways along the Texas coast, hosted a thriving population of this keystone wetlands species.
Going on two centuries later, most of those waterways and wetlands still do. And so do many — if not most — other freshwater waterways and wetlands in the eastern half of the state and a bit beyond. Even Buffalo Bayou, almost wholly transformed into an urban waterway in the middle of the nation’s fourth-largest city and solidly lined by industry instead of its original swampy riverine forest, continues as home to a handful of these signature saurians.
Alligators — and alligator hunting — remain a part of modern Texas.
That point’s plainly evidenced by the hundreds of calls Texans make this time of year to report unexpected and invariable benign encounters with the reptiles as the gators’ mating season kicks in. Young males and females scatter across the landscape looking to stake claim to territory not already taken by larger alligators. Often, that wandering brings them into canals, ditches, ponds and even yards, where they prove a shock and concern to humans.
And the gator’s place in the state’s culture also is manifested by the Texans who participate in the two-part alligator hunting season held annually in the state. One of those hunting opportunities — a “spring” season open in all but the most alligator-rich counties of the state — is a little more than halfway through its threemonth run.
No longer endangered
That alligators continue to exist in Texas — and in large numbers — and have, in fact, expanded their range to now include almost half the counties in the state is “one of the great conservation success stories,” said Jonathan Warner, who heads the alligator program for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Texas may have held more than a million alligators before European settlement. By the 1960s, that number had plummeted to just a few thousand, most of them clustered in the remaining expanses fresh and intermediate marsh in the state’s southeast corner. Alligators were designated an endangered species by the federal government in 1967 and by Texas in 1969.
Passage in the late 1960s and early 1970s of state and federal laws protecting remaining alligators, including significant punishment for violating those laws and vigorous enforcement of those legal protections triggered a rebound of gator numbers.
By the early 1980s, Texas’ gator population was at a level to where federal law allowed a highly regulated hunting season to begin in Texas. In 1987, alligators were removed from the federal endangered species list.
Texas alligator population has boomed over the past 40 years. While it is tough to get a precise count of the state’s alligators — they are notoriously hard for managers to census across their entire range, especially in swamps, river systems and other timbered waterways and wetland — wildlife managers have some idea.
“Estimates are that Texas’ population is somewhere in the range of 350,000 to a half-million, and probably closer to a half-million,” Warner said.
The majority of those gators are in 22 counties along the coast and in Southeast Texas, termed “core counties” under TPWD’s current alligator management plan. And those core counties are the site of the state’s most productive hunting season for the reptiles.
Since 1984, Texas has held a three-week alligator hunting season in those counties during September. Alligator harvest is regulated through issuance of tags to landowners. TPWD issues the tags, required by state and federal law, based on the alligator population on the privately owned tract. The agency also allows limited public hunting opportunities on some of its wildlife management areas along the coast.
TPWD is conservative with tag issuance, offering only 2,000-2,200 tags each year over the 22 counties — far less than 1 percent of the overall gator population in those counties. And only about 1,800-2,000 gators are taken, Warner said.
But those core counties are hardly the only ones with alligators. Currently, alligators are found in 123 of Texas’ 254 counties. Almost every county in the eastern half of the state, from the Red River to the Rio Grande, hosts alligators. They have been documented as far west as Kimble County, more than 100 miles west of San Antonio. And there are a surprising number of alligators in places many never would expect them.
That point is illustrated by the results of the state’s “spring” alligator season, currently underway.
Hunting strictly enforced
Since 2007, Texas has allowed a three-month alligator season in all counties except the 22 “core” counties. The season, which runs April 1-June 30, allows a person holding a Texas hunting license and hunting on private property with landowner permission to take one alligator per license year, with strict requirements on reporting the take and obtaining a federally required tag from TPWD.
Within 72 hours of taking an alligator, spring-season hunters in non-core counties are required to complete an Alligator Hide Tag Report Form and mail it to TPWD headquarters in Austin along with a $21 hide tag fee. The agency sends the hunter a tag, which must remain with the gator.
This year, like most years in the decade the spring season has been open, hunters have taken gators from some places that you would expect — counties adjacent to the “core” counties in Southeast Texas. So far this spring season, gators have been taken from counties including Montgomery, Walker and Henderson, Warner said.
But Kleberg County, wrapped around hyper-saline Baffin Bay in South Texas has been a top producer during this spring’s season. And the largest alligator reported so far this season — an 11-foot, 4-inch “bull” gator — came from LaSalle County, in the heart of the South Texas “brush country” and far from the coast. In previous seasons, several alligators, including some huge males, were taken from Maverick County, another South Texas county where you expect to see cactus and mesquite and maybe a mountain lion but not alligators.
The spring gator season doesn’t see a lot of alligators taken. The average is about 200 gators from three dozen or so counties. As of a week ago, 55 gators had been reported taken this season, Warner said.
Almost all gators harvested during the spring and September seasons are taken by recreational hunters. That is a huge shift from when alligator hunting returned in the 1980s. Then, most of the harvest was for commercial sale of alligators for the hide market.
But development of commercial alligator “farms” — and commercial farms for their caiman and crocodile relatives in other countries — has collapsed the commercial market for wild-caught alligators. The availability of higher-quality hides produced by commercial gator farms — skins without the scars and other irregularities inherent in wild gators — means no demand for wildcaught gators. Prices for wildcaught gators has plunged from as much as $75 or more per foot in the mid-1980s to less than $10 a foot, if that.
The shift away from a largely commercial harvest of gators to primarily recreational hunting has been largely positive for Texas gators.
“From an ecological standpoint, the collapse of the widehide market has been an overall benefit for alligators in Texas,” Warner said.
But there are some isolated problems with the shift to recreational hunting. Much of the focus has turned to taking the largest gators, particularly big males, with prices charged for such hunts bringing far more than the gator’s hide would have brought on the commercial market even at its peak.
Those big males — and any truly huge gator is almost certainly a male; females seldom grow to more than 8 feet — are crucial to the overall health of the gator population.
Mating season underway
These old males — and they are old, with a 10- to 12-footer maybe 30 years old — serve as a control of the overall population in their areas. They are territorial creatures and brook few trespassers, killing and eating smaller gators. Removing only older males from a population can result in an overabundance of smaller gators, kind of like a farm pond overpopulated with stunted sunfish. And that is one of the reasons some areas of Texas gator range is saturated with the 4- to 6-foot gators that tend to show up in people’s back yards or ponds.
“We’re seeing this problem in some areas,” Warner said of the negative effects of removing big male gators.
Still, Texas has no shortage of alligators. Only Louisiana and Florida have more. And the next generation of Texas gators are in the works right now.
With May comes the peak of alligator mating activity, Warner said. Through June, females will be building their nests — mounds of vegetation plastered with mud — and laying clutches of as many as 50 eggs.
In August, after 60-65 days of the eggs being incubated by the Texas sun and the heatproducing mass of rotting vegetation, the eggs hatch. The female gator, triggered by instinct or perhaps the sound of her brood chirping in their shells, claws apart the nest, freeing the buried young and ensuring that their kind will continue to be a part of Texas’ landscape and a crucial part of the state’s wetland ecosystems.