Picture is from The National Geographic.The big news about this is it's Morgan County Missouri, not Morgan County Alabama. Link here and amusing comments to boot! Seems the missing alligator can survive, he/she just can't breed in the unlikely case he/she finds another alligator. The missing gator wasn't 3 miles from a very large freshwater lake, The Lake Of The Ozarks, I think somewhere I read there's more shoreline on it than California has on the Pacific but that's counting all the coves and creeks up quite a ways, maybe it's Lake of The Ozarks and Truman Lake combined which would be quite plausible.
Evidently it was a pet and was stolen or let loose or something. A local festival was going on not 2 miles from where the Alligator was, the festival is called the Pigeon Swap and is actually in a field that's on top of a huge cave. I kid you not. This is also like 2 miles from my daughters house. No alligator sightings were reported @ the Pigeon Swap and that's not a line you'll hear every day. (the pigeon swap is a giant flea market/street fair type atmosphere, it's great if you like to walk and buy animals or anything handmade or anything actually).
The reason I was reminded of said alligator is a relative emailed me and suggested we needed to put the dogs in the house, she had heard of the alligator from the authorities in the next county? I actually hadn't thought of it. Said Alligator is 10 miles away as the crow flies, granted it's a sparsely populated 10 miles but I would think he would head south to the lakes. When she emailed me I had just come back from fishing @ the little pond with my grandsons and left them down there (grandsons finished mowing the "other" part of the lawn today and weedeated! Thanks Zach and Marcus! So grandma went fishing with them). It's not far from the house but it did give me the willies the authorities thought it could come this far? I guess living in Mississippi not far from the coast with all the displaced alligators and baby ones bobbing up investigating my fishing line made me more blase about alligators than the average Missourian? I did see something in the pond but I'm pretty sure it was a turtle.
I told my husband when he called about the alligator on the loose, I'd forgot to tell him before. Husband being in down South where there really are alligators thought I was full of bull hockey till I explained the story, I had to repeat the line twice that there was an alligator on the loose up here, he thought the phone was messing up. I just hope they find the gator and he doesn't cause too much of a stir. Or appear on my doorstep anytime.
Postscript: Go to this link for another look @ the missing gator and also a gator that was actually caught in a park lake in Sherman TX, granted TX is south but Sherman is north of Dallas. I believe there is one that lives in DeQueen AR also. Do not ask me how I know this. One was sighted in Indiana also, you start looking for gators where they shouldn't be and egads they are everywhere!
