Alligator seen tossing football and catching it with its teeth in Florida Everglades
An alligator was seen tossing a football in the air and catching it between its teeth in Florida’s Everglades National Park, prompting park officials to take away its ball.
A park visitor reported the odd display May 31 along the Tram Trail near the visitor’s center.
It turns out the alligator has a reputation for being something of a Shark Valley showoff.
“This bull gator was familiar to the rangers as he is often seen at the start of tram tours with a female (or cow) gator he is courting and her young offspring,” the park reported in a June 16 Facebook post.
“The gator held his head high in the air, with his jaws firmly gripping the football as though it were prey. He tossed the football and caught it again, adjusting his grip.”
It was only a matter of time before the gator swallowed the ball, so rangers called alligator biologist Mark Parry in Homestead for advice.
He decided someone needed to take the ball away, and he volunteered to do it.
“Luckily, the gator crushed his ‘prey’ at a measured pace and was still working on it when Mark Parry arrived,” the park reported.
“Using two long poles and rope, he attempted to snatch the football; the gator dropped it and was thus saved from ingesting leather and plastic. ... The lucky alligator continues to delight visitors on the Tram Trail, as they walk, bike, or ride trams past!”
It’s the second time this year a Florida alligator was seen chewing a football in the wild. The other incident was documented by photographer Sandra Rayman Harrison March 11 at Monument Lake Campground in Big Cypress National Preserve. The mangled ball was later recovered — uneaten.
Officials at Everglades National Park are still wondering how one of their gators got a football in a swamp.
“We don’t know if the littering that caused this event was deliberate or accidental, such as from playing catch in an inappropriate location,” the park said.
“Shark Valley rangers have added the football to their collection of props for interpretive programs.”
Parry is being lauded by wildlife groups for saving the alligator from “a nasty bellyache.”
The South Florida Wildlands Association says the playful predator is known for lying “across the tram road and giving visitors on foot a difficult choice when they have to go around him (with little room between the jaws and the canal).”
Alligators are “a keystone species” in the 1.5-million-acre Everglades National Park, a wetland where the largest of the males can reach 15 feet, the National Park Service says.
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