Alligator Scare In North Carolina Town Prompts Police Warning

KITTY HAWK, NC — Alligators go where they want and nothing humans do can change that, no matter how much the residents of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, may wish otherwise. A gator showed up in a waterfront neighborhood Monday morning, prompting the police department to warn residents to keep a watchful eye on their children and pets.

The reptile was about 9½ feet long, which is fairly big for a North Carolina alligator, but it wasn’t 15 feet long, as some people reported. That would make it ginormous by American alligator standards — not that size matters much when the fast-moving, strong-jawed reptiles show up in residential areas and bare their sharp teeth. The biggest alligator ever recorded in the Outer Banks region measured 10½ feet, according to gator experts.

The alligator was found in a canal separating two streets in the Kitty Hawk Landing neighborhood. A Coastal North Carolina Alligator Research team got wind of it on the police radio after stopping at Duck Donuts for a snack, captured the alligator, hauled it ashore, and measured and tagged it before releasing it back where they’d found it.

That didn’t sit well with some residents who thought the menacing reptile should be taken far, far away from the neighborhood. But that’s not the job of the research team, which has been studying alligators on the Albemarle Peninsula for eight years, according to a Facebook post.

The story about the alligator unfolding on Facebook is a bit of a big fish story that grows with each telling. One fella, who may have been joking, said the gator was 16 feet long when it was removed from the water, but "shrunked up" due to "dehydramacation." Someone else said it was 50 years old and had been living in the Kitty Hawk area its entire life. Some said the reptile should be allowed to swim the canal to its big gator heart's content, and others just plain freaked out.

In any case, the research team “cannot transport or relocate any alligators” under its state and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits, the research team's Facebook post said.

Although longtime Kitty Hawk Landing resident Mike Furlo told The Virginian-Pilot that “nobody ever remembers seeing an alligator here before,” residents may want to get used to seeing the reptiles sliding out of the water and into their neighborhoods.

The researchers — who include Steve Dinkelacker, a biology professor at Framingham State University, and Rob Verzone, of Capron Park Zoo, both in Massachusetts — have heard stories about alligators crawling onto the beaches, but hadn’t seen it for themselves.

“The Outer Banks is available habitat,” Dinkelacker told The Coastland Times. “And we know alligators can go out in the salt water for a month or two at a time.”

Dinkelacker and Verzone travel to the Albemarle Peninsula three to five times a year to tag and study alligators, mostly on the mainland near the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.

Three years ago, researchers from North Carolina State University documented a stable and increasing population of alligators in the swampy areas of Dare and Hyde counties. The study noted the large reptiles seldom crawl into residential neighborhoods, according to The Virginian-Pilot.

Here’s the discussion of the alligator on Facebook:

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