Aligator Dundee

My friends talked me into staying one more day with them on the Gulf Coast. Hey, another day of the beach, great seafood restaurants and Woodchuck cider was not a difficult sell.

Late in the afternoon we went out to a Wildlife Nature Preserve. The drought was very evident there and we hardly saw any wildlife. Central and southern Texas are very scorched and dry. Very sad.

In the Preserve we only saw a few deer, a couple of raccoons, squirrels and this little guy.

I think we startled him when we walked up. He turned around very quickly and started moving towards us with his mouth open. We quickly moved the opposite direction. He was easily 6 or 7 feet long.

We continued along on our walk a little more aware of creatures in the shadows. Charles found a small log about 4 foot long and about two and half inch diameter, he felt better having something to defend us against mean critters.

Well, we had some liquid courage and he decided we were going to get a picture of the gator, he could poke it to get a really good picture. We found it further back in the trees and we got about 3 feet from it. It had laid down and was no longer in attack mode so I got this picture.

That's about all the excitement I wanted for the day. But at least it was a fun little adventure.