Here’s a sight neither Kat nor I had ever noticed before.  Alongside the road to Slidell, LA driving northeast from St. Bernard State Park I spotted the corpses of two misfortunate animals, miles apart, each killed by traffic.  These were not deer, opossums nor raccoons, not hawks or buzzards, certainly not dogs or cats.  Not snakes either; you rarely see a roadkill snake these days.  That raises the question: Are snakes becoming wiser about cars, or just less plentiful?

Few if any of you, our seven readers, have ever seen roadkill alligators, but here in the swamps northeast of New Orleans East I saw two of them.  Each was five or six feet long.  Not fully grown, but way larger than those dried two footers we used to see in Florida souvenir shops.  Big enough to kill your dog, but maybe still small enough to respect you.  That is unless you try to take away their dog.  These gators are big enough to make trouble for people, certainly the smaller ones. 

It’s sad for those gators, but a great survival story for their species.  Not too long ago, oh maybe 50 years, science feared we had driven gators, wolves, and bald eagles to extinction.  Laws changed to ban DDT which weakened the eggshells of eagles and outlawed gator and eagle shooting. This worked and eagles and alligators have become plentiful.  Nobody wanted to protect the wolves out west, but in politics two outta three ain’t bad.    A gator renaissance will be a very good thing for the Everglades.  Huge boa constrictors have killed off most of the mammals in that national park, and the only predator willing to take on the largest snakes are human bounty hunters.  But the greatest predator on small to mid-sized anacondas in that swamp (the ones that would otherwise grow into monsters) is the American alligator.

Enter the bad guy, unexpectedly and suddenly, as the hero.  The gators might save the diversity of wildlife in the Everglades.  Yes, snake hunters must first take out the biggest, but after that, gators gotta eat.  And there’s not much else around, so they will live on a high snake diet.  The snakes will get some of the gators too.  But predator based ecosystems can only last so long.  Without easy kills, every meal turns into mortal combat.   And in 30 or so years, the snakes and gators will be rare enough to re-introduce rabbits, possums, raccoons. Then a few years later foxes and bobcats. In a hundred years it is possible that mankind has undone the damage done by all those pet anacondas released into drainage ditches.

I believe science is good.  Those Dr. Wizards know a lot more about the stuff they have studied for years than those of us who didn’t study it for half an hour.  Take your vaccines and fear not.  Don’t take no anti-vaxxer guff.  And don’t go paddling anywhere in the Everglades without a 9mm automatic, a steady hand, sharp eyes and somebody else in your boat with her own 9mm and the confidence to use it well.

Ah, there is some good news on that front. It’s as easy to buy a high caliber automatic pistol as ever before.  One can be yours for $500 and a rudimentary background check. The concealed carry permit is extra $ and you have to take a class. But hey, you might learn something!