Roaming ‘gator causes a stir in Dougherty County subdivision

ALBANY – When Floyd Jones’ wife called him twice in rapid succession while he was at work, he knew it must be an emergency and that he should call her back quickly.

It’s a good thing he did: There was a prehistoric visitor in the yard stalking the couple’s home.

Well, actually it was a 5-foot-long alligator that was just taking a stroll on the 600 block of Pine Glenn Drive. 

When a neighbor pulled in to alert her, Patricia Jones, probably fortunately, did not look at the security camera. If she had, she would have seen the alligator at their bedroom window. 

“She would have probably had a heart attack,” Jones said. “A neighbor from down the street was riding by on his motorcycle. At first he thought it wasn’t real; then he saw his head moving. He stopped and blew his horn. He told her ‘Don’t go out.’

“I knew something was going on because my wife called me back-to-back. She said, ‘There’s an alligator in the yard.’”

The Dougherty County Police Department and Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which lassoed the alligator for removal, responded. So did a number of curious neighbors.

“Everybody came out to look,” Jones said. “It gave a lot of excitement in the subdivision here. He started out in the front yard and he ended up in the back.”

It was the second sighting of an alligator in the subdivision in about a decade, Jones said.

Alligators who wander into residents’ yards are usually trapped and released in a safe area for them and farther away from people, Kayla Harrelson, administrative assistant for the DNR’s Wildlife Resources Division office in Albany, said. 

The office generates a number of calls about alligators, particularly from Lake Blackshear, where the reptiles sometimes take up residence at boat docks. People sometimes feed them, which leads them to becoming a nuisance as they will approach other humans looking for a snack.

“If it’s a pond, we can remove them,” Harrelson said. “If it’s a lake, there’s nothing we can do. That’s where they live.”

The large reptiles are moving this time of year, probably looking for a cool spot in the heat, she said. Residents in areas where alligators roam should be on the alert, keep pets on a leash and keep children away from the water.

“They can give us a call and we can see about sending trappers out to remove them,” Harrelson said. “Most of the time, (trappers will) relocate them. If they see one that’s deemed to be aggressive, they (trappers) could euthanize it.”