Steve and I had the opportunity to join a friend (Scott) on an outing to collect alligator eggs. Scott helps out a gentleman who farms alligators and has been egg collecting for the last 12 years with him.
A helicopter is used as well as airboats. As Scott's boat is the largest, we got to play "mamma gator" and ferry eggs from the collecting sites to the landing zone primarily.
The morning starts out with the helicopter showing up and off we go
This is what we're looking for. A large mound of vegetation, sometimes guarded by a very territorial momma.
The little R22 only holds two people, so the pilot will drop one person on a nest with nothing but an aluminum pole and an "egg basket" leave and go pick up someone else to drop them on another nest.
Here in FL you are only allowed to harvest 1 out of every 2 nests you find
When a nest has been collected, the pilot will pick the harvester back up and drop them somewhere near the airboats to collect a new egg basket and off they'll go to find another nest.
And here are the eggs. If the eggs are, or at one time were, fertile they will have a birth ring around the entire egg. Eggs that do not develop embryos will not have a birth ring around them.
Not all nests are found by helicopter. Some are found by walking and by the folk in the airboats.
In addition to taking the full egg baskets from the harvesters and supplying them with a new basket, we were able to participate in the egg collecting as well with nests that we found near different landing zones.
After carefully uncovering the nest, you begin marking all the eggs with a sharpie to indicate which direction is UP so that when you place them in the egg basket, you are properly positioning the eggs so you don't kill the embryos.
The nest that I was on, there were about 30 eggs collected.
Steve also got in some action as well.
Hey check it out! There's a baby dinosaur growing in here!
At the nest, momma was absent, but that is not always the case. And sometimes momma is quite aggressive in regards to trespassers, though usually a good bonk or two on the head from the aluminum pole will help keep her at bay.
After taking big bunches of nests back to the landing zone, there was more work.
The eggs had to be removed from the egg baskets to be put into their permanent homes for the incubators....that is when all the counting of eggs got done, and then later candeling of the eggs to see which ones are "bad".
It is a very hot, dirty, sweaty, tiring job....but I guess someone has to supervise
It was a lot of fun though. i hope I can get to do it again in the future. Storms cut our day short, but we managed to collect about 700 good eggs. Another couple of dozen that were deemed bad.
Danibeth
A helicopter is used as well as airboats. As Scott's boat is the largest, we got to play "mamma gator" and ferry eggs from the collecting sites to the landing zone primarily.
The morning starts out with the helicopter showing up and off we go
This is what we're looking for. A large mound of vegetation, sometimes guarded by a very territorial momma.
The little R22 only holds two people, so the pilot will drop one person on a nest with nothing but an aluminum pole and an "egg basket" leave and go pick up someone else to drop them on another nest.
Here in FL you are only allowed to harvest 1 out of every 2 nests you find
When a nest has been collected, the pilot will pick the harvester back up and drop them somewhere near the airboats to collect a new egg basket and off they'll go to find another nest.
And here are the eggs. If the eggs are, or at one time were, fertile they will have a birth ring around the entire egg. Eggs that do not develop embryos will not have a birth ring around them.
Not all nests are found by helicopter. Some are found by walking and by the folk in the airboats.
In addition to taking the full egg baskets from the harvesters and supplying them with a new basket, we were able to participate in the egg collecting as well with nests that we found near different landing zones.
After carefully uncovering the nest, you begin marking all the eggs with a sharpie to indicate which direction is UP so that when you place them in the egg basket, you are properly positioning the eggs so you don't kill the embryos.
The nest that I was on, there were about 30 eggs collected.
Steve also got in some action as well.
Hey check it out! There's a baby dinosaur growing in here!
At the nest, momma was absent, but that is not always the case. And sometimes momma is quite aggressive in regards to trespassers, though usually a good bonk or two on the head from the aluminum pole will help keep her at bay.
After taking big bunches of nests back to the landing zone, there was more work.
The eggs had to be removed from the egg baskets to be put into their permanent homes for the incubators....that is when all the counting of eggs got done, and then later candeling of the eggs to see which ones are "bad".
It is a very hot, dirty, sweaty, tiring job....but I guess someone has to supervise
It was a lot of fun though. i hope I can get to do it again in the future. Storms cut our day short, but we managed to collect about 700 good eggs. Another couple of dozen that were deemed bad.
Danibeth
