On the Verge of Extinction

Traditional alligator hunting is seeing its last days 

            Gerard Sellers remembers the first time he hunted for alligators. He was a young boy, about six or seven years old, armed with a shotgun, a skinning knife, a headlight and a battery. Sitting in the pirogue as his father steered and propelled the small boat across the marsh with a pole, he scanned the water, eyes wide open with both fear and excitement.  "You knew it was a gator 'cause its eyes would shine back at you like two fiery coals just floating on top of the water,"  Sellers says. But most of the time, the hunters saw signs of an alligator, not the animal itself. In Sellers' youth, hunters followed an alligator's trail to its home-usually a small pond created by many holes the alligator dug to find fresh water. Standing chest-deep in water, the hunter drove an 18-20 foot pole set with catfish hooks into the hole and hooked the alligator. When he pulled the animal out of its hole, the hunter hit it over the head with a hand ax. Then he skinned it on the spot, stuffed the skin into a sack and moved on to the next hole.  Living off the marsh year round, most hunters chose not to think about its dangers. And in fact, being attacked by an alligator was the least of their worries.  "A man who's been fishing out here a while knows by  instinct where an alligator's at. For one thing, an alligator puts out an odor of musk. Once you identify what it is, you never forget that smell, so you know he's there even if you don't see him," Sellers says.  While hunters brag about landing 14-foot alligators, they tell horror stories about catching malaria or being bitten by snakes.  "The hunting conditions are unbearable," Sellers says. Hunters brave sweltering heat, vicious horseflies, salt in the wounds and eyes and tempers flaring to bring home a sack full of skins. Yet Sellers won't give it up.  "The reason we do these things, hunt alligators, is because it's the way our people have been doing it for generations-the way my grandfather's done it, my father's done it and the way I do it. There's a sense of pride in what we do, a family tradition," Sellers says. 

Sellers' father and grandfather both alligator hunted to supplement their incomes, sometimes hunting all night long with little success. Sellers hunts himself, but he takes equal interest in documenting the remaining hunters whose traditions are dying as they pass on. A native of Abbeville, in the Bayou Cajun region, Sellers works as a location scout and manager, production coordinator and historian. He produced and directed Alligator Hunters: A Louisiana Legacy, a documentary that details the old hunting process and the changes to the marsh, and records a few of the old hunters carrying on the delightful Cajun tradition of storytelling.  Sellers, a native French speaker, also relates stories he's heard over the years about alligator hunting in the old days.  "Alligators used to be so plentiful that the old timers talk about shining a lantern over the water at night time and the eyes of the alligators shine back at you like so many stars in the heavens,"  Sellers says.   Not so any more. In the 1920s, land companies bought up the marshland in tracts of hundreds of thousands of acres. They built canals and camps and systematically harvested the alligators.  "After a period of years there was just a patchwork of canals throughout that marsh. The ecology of the marsh had changed forever," Sellers says. Drought and marsh fires forced the alligators into smaller and smaller areas, while marsh buggies allowed hunters to cover more land in pursuit.  By 1958, the alligator population had decreased drastically and the price of skins rose rapidly from $2.25 to $12 a foot. The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, concerned that alligators would become extinct, shut down hunting in 1963.  Nine years later, a limited season was opened, but in the meantime hunters had turned to other means of income. 

Today, hunters must register and pay a license fee to hunt a limited number of alligators. The hunting process has changed as well. Some old timers continue the traditional practices, but most hunters set baited lines from a boat. When an alligator takes the bait, the captors pull up the line and shoot the animal in the head.  As always, exposed areas of the alligator skin must be salted to preserve it from the heat. The skin is rolled and stored in a 55-gallon drum in preparation for sale. At the end of the season, the hides are sold at auction, where hunters display their catch for buyers to inspect.   While the hunters look forward to the auctions and the income they bring, the old timers also feel a twinge of sadness at the disappearance of their companions and traditions. "With each hunt there are fewer and fewer of the old hunters left," Sellers says. "They can't help but wonder who will be there next year."   

-Angie Delcambre  

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