Wildlife officials seeing growing number of alligators in Chattahoochee – and they’re staying

MUSCOGEE COUNTY, Ga. — Along the Chattahoochee River in Muscogee County, Bulldog Bait and Tackle is open 365 days a year.

Marshall Berger runs the counter in the back.

“We have crickets. We have red worms,” are just some of the things Marshall said the store sells.

Mildred Williams bakes biscuits and sells the knick-knacks.

Her husband Ferrell owns the place and over the course of his 92 years, he’s heard it all.

“A lot of people have got stories, and they’re true stories,” Ferrell Williams said.

Some of them are honest-to-goodness nightmares.

“They’re dangerous creatures. They will kill you,” Ferrell Williams said.

Down at the dock, deputies are on the case aboard the sheriff’s patrol boat. Investigator Chris Paniccioli is at the helm. Investigator Russell Sharman is riding shotgun.

The men are trying to track down the growing number of the largest apex predator to ever haunt the waterway -- the American alligator.

“I’ve seen an increase in the alligator population on the Chattahoochee in just the two years I’ve been here,” investigator Russell Sharmon said. “At first it was one, two, or three. Now it’s 10, or 12, or 15.”

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The great big reptiles are working their way up north.

Middle Georgia is 150 miles from the Florida line. There are more alligators coming every year, and they must like it because they’re staying here in Georgia and growing larger and larger.

“What the biggest one you ever saw out here?” Channel 2′s Berndt Petersen asked Sharman.

“Probably 14 foot,” Sharmon said -- right off the bow of his boat.

“Too close for comfort?” Petersen asked Paniccioli.

“Close enough,” Paniccioli said.

Some wildlife biologists believe people brought some of them to Middle Georgia when baby gators outgrew their terrariums.

The state Department of Natural Resources first spotted some back in the 1980′s.

These days and nights, many environmentalists insist that climate change has led some of the reptiles to stray out of the Sunshine State into similar conditions in the Peach State.

DNR believes there are now as many as 250,000 gators living in Georgia.

“I don’t think they migrate back down to Florida. They’re here,” Sharman said.

And the gators in the Chattahoochee are fattening up on a steady diet of deer and beavers.

“We find animals all the time bit in two,” Sharman said.

So far, there have been no reported attacks on people. Such things are very rare. But Sharman and Paniccioli told Petersen that this could become a serious safety issue.

“When we see an increase in the alligator population, we’re gonna say it. There’s not anything that can take on a 14-foot gator out here,” Sharman said.

Back at the bait shop, Ferrell Williams offered this advice: “Be careful. The alligators are not going anywhere. You are.”

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