Waist Deep with Alligators
My day with wildlife removal specialist Jared Pollard
“My goal is to continue working and have all my limbs attached.”
This is Jared Pollard, nuisance animal removal specialist and owner of Wildernex Wildlife Control. He’ll gladly crawl under your house to remove a skunk or a possum or some snakes. But what he really likes doing is wading in waist-deep water with an animal that can bite with nearly 3000 pounds-per-square inch of pressure.
My goal for today is find out if I like it as much as he does.
After months of staying in contact with Jared hoping he’d let me join him on an alligator removal call he finally had one that he thought would be perfect. So I packed my dad’s hip waders and drove down to the Stonefield Terrace neighborhood in north east Houston. I met him in the parking lot of an elementary school. Next to this parking lot was a walking path that surrounded a large drainage ditch, just like you see in many Houston-area neighborhoods.
He’d been called out to remove an alligator that was spotted in the waters of this drainage ditch and posted about on social media by the residents of the neighborhood.
We strapped on our waders in the parking lot as Jared filled me in on the plan for the day. Last time he was in this neighborhood it took him three days to capture his prey. A sense of dread set in. Though it was a cloudy day and only in the high 80s, the oppressive Houston humidity was already causing me to sweat. The waders were making it even worse. It was like wearing a trash bag in a sauna.
At this point I wasn’t even worried about the potential of losing a finger or a limb to an alligator bite, I was more terrified of a heat stroke from sloshing around all day in the heat.
***
I don’t think humans were made to live in Houston. Everything about this place reminds you that you shouldn’t be here. The massive network of swamps and bayous just wait to overflow with each rain storm. Swarms of mosquitos lurk outside your door ready to suck you dry. The air is thick with humidity. If you’re thirsty you can just take a straw outside and suck in the air to get a nice gulp of H20. Also, hurricanes. It’s Florida without the fun.
Houston was made for alligators. They’ve been here for millions of years, they thrive in this environment. They patrol the swamps and bayous, keeping everything perfectly in order. They are not only the apex predator, they’re the keystone species. Meaning, they are vital for the survival of the entire ecosystem.
“When you have periods of drought the alligators have their dens and the wallows that are in front of the dens. By their excavations they provide actual shelter and habitat for other animals in times of distress,” Louise Hayes, author of Alligators in Texas told me. “They also add nutrients in the water via their waste material. They keep other species under control and alligators actually keep their own species under control.”
Meaning, you know, they kill and eat their own kind.
We need alligators. During the 20th century they were almost driven to extinction by humans. But efforts of Texas Parks & Wildlife brought the population back. It’s estimated that as many as 500,000 live in Texas, mostly in the Gulf Coast counties of the Houston area.
But you know who else lives in that area? Seven million humans.
To accommodate that many people in this challenging environment requires a lot of things that are counter to the alligator’s existence. Chief among them are subdivisions. Remember those swamps and bayous and lakes and ponds full of alligators that have been living here for millions of years? Yeah, well “Crestview Manour Estates” wants a pristine neighborhood lake next to a walking trail and they don’t exactly need the lawsuits that would come as a result of a 10-foot reptile snacking on Debbie’s yorkie.
So that’s where Pollard comes in.
Of course, it’s not as simple as that. TPWD makes sure that you can’t just remove any alligator you want. Like I said, they’re pretty vital to the entire ecosystem. If an alligator is deemed a nuisance, it can be removed. This constitutes a bit of a grey area. Chad from California who just dropped $800,000 on a 1400 square foot house using the relocation allowance he got from his company who moved corporate headquarters to Texas is probably going to say that every alligator he sees is a nuisance. But in reality, for Pollard’s services to be needed the alligator typically has to have shown some kind of aggression or at least found itself in a place he shouldn’t be, like Chad’s patio.
“I’m not going to come to Lake Conroe and remove an alligator that you saw on your dock,” Pollard says.
Oftentimes, alligators become nuisances because they have been fed by humans. If they lose their natural fear of people, the results can be dangerous.
However, alligator attacks are exceedingly rare in Texas, even as interactions between humans and alligators have increased. According to Alligators in Texas, the first known person killed by an alligator in the state was in the 17th century when a man named Dumesnil was drowned while swimming across the Colorado River as part of the La Salle expedition to Texas.
Only two other known fatal attacks have occurred in the ensuing centuries. One was in 1836 when Grey B. King was killed in Buffalo Bayou while leading an excursion fleeing Santa Ana’s army.
Nearly two hundred years later, the most famous fatal incident occurred. On July 3, 2015 in Orange, TX, Tommie Woodward from St. Louis shouted “F*** that gator!” before jumping into the water beneath a sign that said “No Swimming. Alligators.”
***
In the course of reporting stories during my career I’ve had a few distinct times where I said in my head, “How exactly did I get here?”
One was while I was riding around in Paul Cauthen’s boat on Lake Palestine going past the Christian summer camp where I spent every summer as a kid and worked as a counselor in college. Pauls’s weed smoke blew past my face as we talked about music and God and life and I thought, “This is way better than a Zoom interview.”
Another time was when I was mailing my DNA overseas and the lady at the post office thought the package contained a very different type of DNA sample than the saliva I was shipping.
But this time stands out. Here I was standing on a steep embankment in a drainage ditch in a Houston neighborhood clad in hip waders with my foot on an alligator’s head teaching an impromptu alligator education class to local residents. Jared was nowhere to be found.
Fortunately, the capture of this alligator had only taken a total of five minutes. I spotted him almost immediately under the bridge, Jared took his fishing rod and cast past the alligator and reeled in, snagging its tail. After that it was just a process of pulling him in without getting snipped by the teeth or whipped by the head.
“That head is hard as a rock,” Jared told me.
It was only about four feet long and it wasn’t really bothering anyone, but because it was hanging out under the bridge in this populated area it can be assumed that he was being fed by people and needed to be relocated.
Pollard wrapped up the mouth with tape and proceeded to try and removed the hook from the tail. But he forgot his pliers in the truck. Good thing he brought an assistant along with him today.
Which is how I ended up with my foot on this gator’s head. Of course all the activity invited onlookers who started crowding closer once they realized it was safe. I guess I looked pretty confident in my new job.
That’s when the questions started flying in and, to be honest, as a kid from East Texas who grew up around alligators I was shocked at people’s ignorance of these creatures that they share their territory with.
Would it have gotten any bigger?
Yeah they can get up to 15 feet and weigh up to a 1000 pounds. So, like, 50 times bigger than this?
Is that an alligator or crocodile?
Alligator. There are no crocodiles here.
Are there more of those in here?
Is there traffic in Houston?
You get the picture.
After Jared returned with the pliers and removed the hook, one guy insisted on getting a photo with the alligator while his wife continued on their planned exercise walk.
“Hurry up! You’re just trying to get out of walking,” she yelled from the other side of the ditch.
He giddily smiled in the photos and then trotted along to catch up to her.
Pollard and I loaded up the alligator in the truck and headed to a site to release him. You are allowed to euthanize nuisance alligators, but if you’ve ever cleaned an alligator you know it’s a terribly tedious and difficult task. Pollard said he did it one time and decided there had to be a better way. So if an alligator isn’t aggressive he’ll release them in a river system. If they are a threat to people he takes them to a sanctuary.
We found a river system about an hour away and he put the little guy back into the water to find himself a home far away from humans, if such a place still exists amongst the sprawl.
***
Some of these posts will consist of me trying out products, both the productive and the zany. Some of them will be like this one, where I try out a job and go about a day in the life of someone. For the products I’ll give a final review and decide if I’ll keep using it. Next month’s edition will be product-based, I have some fun ones on the way. For the job posts I’ll add an epilogue like this where I decide if I could actually do this job for a living.
I thought about this one a lot. I do think there are parts that I would enjoy. I love the outdoors, the study of animal behavior, the very manly feeling of conquering beasts. But I absolutely couldn’t deal with skunks or bees or those kinds of smelly or stingy things. Jared told me alligator calls, while not uncommon in Houston, are not a major part of his day-to-day job. For every exciting tangle with a gator, there’s probably 20 crawling-under-houses-grabbing-a-family-of-possums-by-the-tails jobs. So, yep, I’m out on this one.
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I appreciate you joining me on this maiden voyage. I’ll leave you with the best quote from Jared. He was telling me about removing a nine-foot alligator that was in someone’s kitchen after Hurricane Harvey. For one that big you need a bunch of guys jumping on it all at once or else you’re in for quite a surprise.
“Anything eight foot and bigger, when you get on their back, if they want to stand up and walk off with you they can. Then you’re just riding on an alligator. And that’s never a good situation.”
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In today’s episode of “Houston is the worst place on Earth”