The sun is drawing and the clouds are piled up like giant airships, and the wind is a marshes' whisper. In the marsh trees there are thousands of snowy egrets engaging in weird mating dances. They have grown special feathers for this act, making them flamboyant. Like the clouds, they are perched everywhere, in a thousand trees. In a way, it's like all these long white necks are bending and swaying to my music. Three thousand dancing birds, swinging and turning in their marshy nests.
And then some enormous pink birds with paddle beaks and green featherless heads go by. They're foraging under the thousands of egrets, wading in a fast moving single file through the marsh.
A scrawny guy had been walking toward me. And now he approaches me and says, "the reason they get'ya is becoz ya can't see-um."
I say, "huh?" and take out my earphones.
He says, "see there." I hadn't. A nine-foot alligator about fifteen feet away from us. "An over dare." He points to a twelve-foot alligator, a giant about forty feet from us. But weren't they asleep for the winter? "They commup on sunny days."
Just for fun, I ask the man (calls himself Skillet) if he's ever heard of anyone ever being attacked by an alligator in this area. 'Nah, I ain' never heard." We chat for a while about alligator and crocodile stories.
Meanwhile, those prehistoric pink birds march past us again in single file, whipping their spoonbills voraciously through the water.
Unlike saltwater crocodiles, which kill an estimated 2,000 people a year, American Alligators are famously docile. Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, proved this with his usual enthusiasm by swimming through Florida rivers and tackling alligators in their own nests with a carelessness he would never allow himself with the more hostile Australian and African saltwater crocodiles.
I tell Skillet about this article I read. About some crocodile in Burundi who some believe has killed 200 people. "Why doesn't someone jus' shoot 'er?" Skillet says.
I say, "I think they've shot her, and she has bullet wounds, but the problem is the country is in a civil war and nobody wants to hunt a giant crocodile in such a dangerous country."
Skillet says, "cool man! Aigh, look at that one right dare." He tells me that he’s loved watching alligators since he was a kid. He says that alligators and gharials (from India) are pretty friendly, but Caimans and Crocs are mean. He knew some stories about alligator attacks in Florida. Some years, he says, they take up to eight people. Usually little kids.
We talk about alligator sex. It turns out the gender of the American alligator is determined not at conception but at the egg stage. The temperature somehow messes with their private parts. Air temperature determines alligator sex. Maybe the dinosaurs became extinct when the Earth's climate changed to such a degree that they bore all males or all females for an extended period of time.
Roseate Spoonbills use a special spoon-shaped bill in unison with strange head-swings to catch a variety of underwater prey. I cannot imagine a more exotic bird that lives in North America.
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