24 August 2011
If Alabama were home to a popular TV show like the History Channel’s “Swamp People,” Niki Staton of Jemison and her friends could be the stars of alligator tales from the Alabama “swamps.”
The four friends have 9 feet, 7 inches and 236 pounds of alligator flesh to prove it, too.
Staton joined friends Lucy Cingoranelli and Jim Cingoranelli of Alabaster and Jamie Smith of Homewood for Alabama’s sixth regulated alligator hunt Aug. 12-14 and Aug. 19-21 in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
- Niki Staton of Jemison killed this 9 feet, 7 inch alligator during a hunt in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
“The three people I went with go every year,” Staton said. “This year, I just wanted to tag along.”
And “tag” she did. Staton entered her name into a lottery for an Alligator Possession Tag and was randomly selected by computer to receive one of only 125 tags issued for the Mobile-Tensaw Delta hunt area.
“It’s strictly by luck,” Cingoranelli said. “You can enter as many times as you want to, and it is $6 an entry. We entered 20 times each.”
Staton said her group almost caught a gator the first weekend of the hunt, but it broke free after about two hours of struggling against the pulls of the hooks in its back.
“We couldn’t get him close enough to the boat to harpoon him,” Staton said. “We lost him and never could find him again.”
Their luck changed the second weekend of the hunt, however.
At 9 p.m. on Aug. 19, the first night of the second hunt, Staton and her group knew exactly where they wanted to go.
After scoping out the waters for half an hour, the group spotted a male gator and stalked him but didn’t try to hook him immediately.
At about 1:30 a.m., they found the same gator again. This time, they were ready to secure the catch.
“We got our first hook in him right at 2:15 a.m.,” Staton said. “We got a second hook in him and felt a little bit better. We wore him down as best we could.”
The gator spent all his energy wrestling with the two hooks, two harpoons and two secure lines tethering him to his hunters.
Between 5 and 5:15 a.m., Staton said, the gator stopped struggling. The crew pulled him to the side of the boat and began lifting him up to the dock.
Normally, alligator hunters use a shotgun-like device called a “bang stick” to kill the gator by popping it on the soft spot behind its eyes, Cingoranelli said. Her husband, Jim, tried to kill their gator with a bang stick but was unsuccessful.
“When we got him to the dock, he still wasn’t dead,” Cingoranelli said. “His eyes were still open. We had to sever his spine.”
The group then took the gator to a weigh station for weighing and measuring, packed him in ice and hauled him to a taxidermist for a full body mount.
“Normally, alligator males are beat up, but he’s really pretty,” Staton said.
Staton’s daughter, Kirstin, “just thought he was the most awesome thing.”
“My family thought I was a little crazy, but thought it was great,” Staton said. “I definitely want to go back next year. It was a blast.”
No comments:
Post a Comment