A bit of Wally's world

Oxbow Meadows Learning Center is refuge for growing reptile

By TIM CHITWOOD - tchitwood@ledger-enquirer.com --

Daniel's in the gator's pen with Wally by the tail.

Wally the alligator abruptly turns, twists and snaps, his toothy jaws coming inches from Daniel's hand. Daniel deftly steps aside and adjusts his grip.

About 7 years old and 5 1/2 feet long, Wally just illustrated why alligators don't make good pets. He's done that before.

While feeding Wally in front of a family visiting Columbus' Oxbow Meadows Environmental Learning Center, Daniel Walker once dangled a dead mail-order rat by the tail for Wally to snap. The gator lunged and snagged Daniel's hand.

Daniel felt the pain and counted his fingers. "I was glad to see them all there," he says. But from two hung ragged strips of skin, dripping blood.

The 24-year-old wildlife coordinator at the Columbus State University learning center quickly wrapped up his hand and drove himself to the emergency room. He got 12 stitches on two fingers and talked to almost everyone working in the ER. How often do you meet someone who just got bit by an alligator?

Daniel now uses tongs about 5 feet long to feed Wally the rats shipped frozen to Oxbow for alligator food. But Wally snacks a bit on his own, too. Daniel once saw him snap a frog in mid-hop.

Wally was someone's 18-inch-long pet when state wildlife officers confiscated him and gave him to Oxbow. He was skinny and missing some teeth, but a steady diet soon got him growing back to the regular gator rate of about a foot a year.

Proportionately, he appears to demonstrate the general rule of alligator size ratio -- the space between a gator's snout and eyes gives you an inch-to-foot idea of his entire length. Out in the wild, the snout and eyes often are all you can see on the water.

Hot and bothered

Wally hisses when Daniel enters the pen, growls when Daniel gets closer, and twists and ducks beneath the surface of his shallow pond as Daniel uses a pole to pull the gator's tail over to grab it.

For a cold-blooded animal, Wally's having a hot day: It's almost noon and the high temperature's headed into the 90s. He's spry. In the cool of the morning, he's much more sedate, Daniel says.

After hibernating through the winter, gators feed again when the water temperature hits the mid-70s. The hotter it gets, the more active they are.

The better they're fed, the bigger they get. Down south, around Lake Eufaula, they get pretty big. While helping CSU biologist Bill Birkhead do a gator survey down there, Daniel saw one that was 13 feet long. Larger ones have been reported.

Just north of Oxbow, in ponds near the city's sewage treatment plant, lives an alligator about 9 feet long.

On average, males grow 13 to 15 feet and females 10 feet. They weigh 450-600 pounds. This time of year, the females build nests in which they lay 25-60 eggs, which they guard.

Gators have big eyes that shine yellow-orange in a spotlight at night, and they have receptors on their jaws that sense ripples, gauging the water displacement to judge the size of what's making waves, Daniel says. The ripples make a gator turn snout to target, to focus those big eyes, and that's how the big reptile decides whether to go after its prey with those big teeth.

On a hot summer day, you want to give a big gator a lot of personal space. And you want to keep your pets away from it, too. And anyone who might be tempted to feed it.

To an alligator, you may look as much like a meal as anything you dangle in front of it.

Contact Tim Chitwood at 706-571-8508 or tchitwood@ledger-enquirer.com