Lack of Rain

This image shows a gathering of gators in a small pool in a canal.

A lack of rain in South Florida has resulted in dry conditions for many of the Everglades canals. As a result alligators suffer from a lack of food source and ease of travel. Where water was it is now dry land.

What strikes me is that the alligators gather for a few days in such pools and then leave, disperse into the tall grasses, I suppose to hunt food and water. This makes foot travel more dangerous to humans. For instance I saw a very large bull alligator exiting a stand of woods, a place they are not normally seen. This lack of water has also produced strange behavior in these animals.

Whenever I've walked up to alligators sunning on a canal bank, they've always pitched, hurled, and or slid into the water to escape me. But on this day a friend, Don MacDonald, and I had photographed these in the pool and then we left. He returned a couple hours later only to find no alligators. He decided to walk along the canal bank, when a large gator stood on all fours and hissed at him. It was then he realized that the couple of hundred alligators were sunning in the tall grass. Another few steps and he would have been in the middle of them as they did not move, but rather stood their ground. He said his skin crawled.

D3s 70-200 f/16 1/60 ISo 1600