HUNTS|Gargantuan gators get grabbed up

It wasn’t a very good weekend for the gators.

“It was definitely the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve ever had hunting anything,” said David Rowland of Monticello, Ark., who helped haul in an 11-foot, 9-inch alligator in Issaquena County. “How many times do you get the chance to hunt something that could just as easily kill you?”

Although a limited gator hunt has taken place on public land in Mississippi since 2005, the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks is allowing highly restricted private land hunts in seven counties for the first time this year. Previously, the reptiles were a protected species in this area.

Friday marked the opening of the season in Warren, Issaquena, Yazoo, Hinds, Holmes, Madison and Rankin counties for individuals and groups that had completed required preliminaries. The season closes Saturday.

A handful of teams from the Po-Luck Hunting Club, leased property in Delta National Forest, filed four permits from Friday until Sunday morning, recording their largest gator at a hair over 12 feet, 6 inches long.

“You don’t really pull them, they pull you,” said Little Rock resident John Wayne Anderson, who was a part of the team that hauled in the biggest gator. “It was a lot tougher than I ever thought it would be.”

Rowland said the gator he helped bring in fought for four hours. They snagged the beast — estimated to weigh between 400 and 500 pounds — with a fishing rod outfitted with 100-pound test braided line, and ended up getting pulled about 200 yards before they finally noosed and shot it Saturday afternoon.

“It’s like trying to pull up a stump out of the ground,” Rowland said. “We don’t have a scale big enough to weight it.”

MDWFP Biologist Jackie Fleeman, who was at the Po-Luck Hunting Club Sunday morning to measure and register the alligators, said the two largest were almost as large as the biggest he’s seen in the area.

“The biggest gator I’ve ever fooled with was 13 feet, 6 inches,” he said. “They may get a litter bigger than that, but not a whole lot in this part of the world.”

Sixteen landowners in the eligible counties bought up 43 of 49 available permits shortly after the private land hunt was announced this summer. MDWFP coordinator Ricky Flynt was not available this morning to comment on the number of gators harvested in Mississippi over the weekend. However, he reportedly confirmed a state record was set for both length and weight on Saturday during the first of two weekend public land hunts on the Pascagoula River, with Jack Hamilton of Wade, Miss., bagging a 13-foot, 6 1/2-inch, 633-pound gator.

The previous record for length of 13 feet, 3/4-inch, was set in 2007, while the previous heaviest gator was 571 pounds, set in 2006.

Landowners with a minimum of 20 acres of surface water were eligible to apply to buy one permit for the private land hunt, with additional tags available for every 100 acres of surface water owned in addition to the first 20 acres. The gators must be at least 4 feet long to be harvested.

In addition to the two large gators brought in by the Po-Luck Hunting Club members, two 8-foot gators were also caught by bow hunters.

This year’s hunt was being conducted as a pilot season, but Flynt has said he anticipates it will be expanded next year to include more eligible counties and permits. Rowland and Anderson, who have hunted deer and other game for years in the Delta National Forest said they will definitely take part in a second private land gator hunt next year.

Alligators remain a protected species in Mississippi, and any killing of alligators without state authorization can result in prosecution.