E65 Naturally Scott Adventures – Alligators, Big Cypress & Florida’s Living Dinosaurs 🐊🌿

Welcome to another edition of Naturally Scott Adventures, where Scott Harris takes you into the field to experience some of North America's greatest wildlife spectacles, iconic species, and wild places.

In this episode, Scott heads deep into Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve in search of one of America's most ancient and awe-inspiring predators: the American alligator. What follows is a journey into a landscape that feels frozen in time, where cypress swamps, sawgrass wetlands, and sun-soaked canals are home to hundreds of alligators and countless other wild creatures. 

Scott shares stories from years of encounters with alligators, including a heart-stopping close encounter with a massive 13-foot gator in South Carolina and why these reptiles inspire a uniquely primal reaction unlike almost any other animal in North America. 

Along the way, he explores why Big Cypress may be the best place in America to see alligators in the wild and what makes these prehistoric predators so successful after more than 100 million years. 

In this episode:

🐊 Why alligators are nature's perfected predators
 🌿 Exploring Big Cypress National Preserve
 🚗 Driving the famous Loop Road
 🦅 Red-shouldered hawks, wood storks, deer, and other wildlife
 🐻 The surprising connection between gators, bears, and Florida panthers
 📸 Tips for finding and photographing alligators
 🦖 Why seeing a giant alligator feels like stepping back in time

From ancient reptiles to unforgettable wildlife encounters, this episode celebrates one of the most fascinating animals in North America.

👉 Stay up to date and get bonus content here: https://naturallyscott.kit.com/5fd12c6752

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Hello, and welcome to Naturally Scott. Thank you so much for joining us. I've got to tell you, I never take it for granted. I appreciate it when people are checking in. And even more exciting recently because we've been picking up some traction as far as viewers and audience, getting some emails and some text messages and stuff. So starting to hear from people, and I'm absolutely loving that. What you just saw were alligators, American alligators. You saw them in Big Cypress National Preserve. That's what we're going to be mostly talking about today. That's down in Florida. It's the single best place in the country to see alligators. And I'll share why as we go through this process. And there will be people that talk about some other places that they enjoy with regards to alligators. And that's very fair. But in my experience and my travels, I have found that Big Cypress National Preserve, if you want to see gators up close, if you want to be virtually guaranteed of seeing gators, that is the place you can go. And that scene you just watched, that little island with the gators on it, and that is that is, I don't want to say common, but it's not uncommon. You see the gators almost all the time, and it's just fantastic. So let's get fired up on the show. My name is Scott Harris. I'm your host, honored to be so. This podcast is Naturally Scott, and this one today is one of our Naturally Scott adventures, uh, which are a relatively new feature to the show. Um it is just me. The guests are not human, they are animal. We've done two previously on the um Spanish colonial mustangs out on the outer banks of North Carolina, and also the snow geese in Les Blus, Missouri, a million snow geese, by the way, in one place. So if you haven't seen that one, go back and watch it because it's pretty cool. But this particular place, what we're talking about, is Big Cypress National Preserve. It's in southern Florida. It actually abuts um with Everglades National Park. So that's kind of a cool thing. And um, which of course is another great place to see alligators, and we'll be talking about that. Now, thing about alligators is in my experience, others may feel different. If you do, send me a note and let me know, and I'll address it in a future podcast. But I think that alligators are the most primal of all animals, um, certainly of the ones that I've seen. Uh, they are the ones that uh, you know, when you see them anywhere in this country, and and they just they reach down into your gut in a way other animals uh don't. Now, they're scary animals, of course. My wife and I were blessed to go on an Afghan Sfire recently, and we saw a lot of animals there that I'd rather not be alone with. Um, and we got charged by elephants twice, so that was pretty cool. Um, of course, it's pretty cool since they didn't get us. Um, but today is going to be about gators. And so the only animals I can I can really think of in the United States that come close to generating uh the kind of primal fear, primal feelings, orcas, although most of us are in boats when we see them. Um I've happened to see them once when I was scuba diving, and grizzly bears. As a matter of fact, I had an adventure with a grizzly bear uh summer before last. My wife and I were up in Jasper National Park in large part to see grizzly bears. And in Jasper, you also get to see a lot of black bears. So my wife and I were driving along this dirt road inside the park, saw some black bears off on the right-hand side. So we pulled over. Uh we were parked on the far left. I walked across the road, got some pictures of the black bears, which was great. The road was pretty narrow, 15 feet maybe, 15 feet wide. As I turned to start to walk back to the car, um, right on the other side of the road, there was a grizzly bear. As a matter of fact, I'll throw up a picture of this bear um just staring at me. The bear was less than 20 feet away from me, and it was an adult bear. Um and now, obviously nothing happened. Here I am telling the story, but I will tell you, I managed to get the camera up and take a picture, though I don't remember doing it. That's the picture you're looking at. What I do remember is standing there um stock still, scared to death, frankly, wondering uh about uh the future purchase of adult diapers when I go out on these adventures. And this bear is just staring at me. As you can see, I can't see the body of the bear. I can just see the head staring at me. Now, I know how fast grizzly bears can move, how big and strong they are. I also know they don't frequently attack humans. So my fear was primal, not necessarily intellectual. Um, but I do know that if that bear had decided I wasn't getting back to the car, I wasn't getting back to the car. Um, and it stared at me for what seemed like hours. I'm certain it was 90 seconds, and then eventually it just kind of pulled its head back and slowly disappeared um into the flora and then was gone. I waited for a minute, walked back to the car, let myself in, told my wife what had just happened. She seemed fairly relieved that uh that she wasn't out there with me. Um, but nonetheless, uh that was a pretty exciting. Now it's exciting, then it was scary. Um, but I want to talk to you, obviously, about gators. Now, uh you hear all the time that the only true constant in nature is change. And that's generally true. I think there's a lot to be said for evolution and adaption and all of those things. Um, but if you study gators at all, you'll find that over the last hundred million years, they really haven't changed. They're the same creature now that they were 10 million years ago, 30 million years ago, a hundred million years ago. Why? Because they've reached killing perfection, very similar to a shark. They have everything they need. Um, they do not have natural predators. Uh obviously, humans um uh hunt them um uh for the uh so they can make boots and purses and stuff, and so they can eat them, the tails being the most popular part. Um, but they don't have a natural predator uh in the same way that a shark doesn't, although orcas will attack sharks. Um but they've just achieved a level of close to perfection. They live where the food is, no natural predators, they live a long time, and uh there doesn't seem to be a reason for them to change from beyond what they are. Now, I will tell you a story. Well, first, Florida is the best known state for alligators, and the estimates are that there's about 1.3 million um gators in Florida. Uh Texas has roughly a half million. Louisiana actually has the most gators in the country. Estimates are two million gators call Louisiana home. Um, and South Carolina, my home state, has about a hundred thousand gators. And I'm going to share with you a story about one of them, which is uh, well, frankly, a little scary. So I was down in a place called Bear Island WMA, Wildlife Management Area, and that's kind of between Charleston and Hilton Head along the coast of South Carolina. I was down there on a weekday and I was just out there taking some pictures and seeing what I could see. I'd gone down by myself. It's maybe a three or four hour drive from the house, four hours, I guess. I didn't see anybody else at the park. I didn't uh run across anybody in the first couple hours I was there, um, nor did I find anybody over the course of the day. Um, so at one point, it's an easy road. Uh, there's dirt roads throughout, they're flat, they're smooth. It's a lot like what we're going to talk about with the loop today. Um, and so you can drive those in a sedan. It doesn't take four-wheel drive or anything. And then there's some little hiking trails off on the side where cars aren't allowed. So I had parked the car and I was taking one of these little hiking trails and heading off to a pond where I had had good experience in the past finding alligators, especially during breeding season. I'm walking down this path, and there's another trail off to the left. A lot of floor, a lot of foliage off to my left, so I can't really see the trail, but I know where it is. So I make this left and I start to turn down this trail. And again, just like the grizzly bear, fewer than 20 feet away from me was a monster alligator. Now, in my mind, it was 40 to 50 feet and a few thousand pounds. Uh, that obviously isn't true. I was able to snap a picture or two, and it turned, which I've lost since then, by the way. Um, but it turns out the gator was about as big as they get. It's about 13 feet long, probably weighed close to 800 pounds. It was massive. Um, the males get bigger, so it was probably a male. 13 feet is about where they top out. It's not that common. Um, but there it was, less than 20 feet away from me, and it slowly turned its head and looked at me, and then slowly turned its head back, absolutely unconcerned. And then in the way that they do, it just started to lift its massive legs. Not massive in height, but in thickness. They're not necessarily not tall, the legs, um, and they just kind of move. If you see them move, it's most distinctive walk in nature, I think. And it just started to move forward, slid down into the pond, disappeared without a ripple or a sound, and off it went. As soon as it was gone, I dropped to my knees. Um, I had just been hit with such a primal fear. We were talking about primal before, and it was just amazing to me. Um, and I kind of caught my breath and uh gave thanks that I was still there and that this gator wasn't hungry. And um, and it was just one of those experiences that sticks with you. It stuck with me for a long time. It's not something I think I'll forget. And um, it was just remarkable to see this apex predator at maximum size and just the way that it moved. All right, back to Big Cyprus. So to get to Big Cyprus, you're down in in southwestern Florida, you're down south of Naples, and Big Cyprus butts up against the Everglades, which is another great place to see gators. It's estimated there's 200,000 gators in the Everglades alone, which is more than Big Cypress. The difference is the concentration is Big Cypress. That's what we like, that's what we look for uh when we're having these adventures, is the ability to really feel comfortable that when you get there, that's what you're going to see. And in this case, that's what happens. So you take US 41 and you're heading east toward Miami, and that's going to lead you to the loop. Now, I tell you that because you'll look up your own driving directions if you're able to go. But here's the fascinating thing. As you're taking that road out there, you see these yellow signs. You've seen them a thousand times, the yellow caution signs along the sides of roads before anything, you know, bridge freezes before road, that kind of thing. But there were a number that stood out to me. There was one that said Panther Crossing, a little picture of a panther. There was one that said, watch for bears. Now, on this particular trip, which was in April of this year, I had already seen some black bears, so I was certainly watching for those. And then there was one that said, do not feed the alligators. I'm not really sure that you need that sign or that you should. If you don't know enough to not hand feed a gator, um, you're probably not long for the world anyway. However, those signs are up there. Now, what struck me as I'm watching these three signs is US 41 is probably the only road in the world that has those three signs on one road. Where else would you find signs for Panther Crossing, Bears, and alligators? Um, anyway, that's I just love that part of it. So now we're in Big Cyprus, which is, by the way, the first national preserve in the country. 1974 was established. Um, it borders Everglades National Park, as we mentioned. It has over 700,000 acres of wetlands. Uh, that's the big protection area. Um, and that's uh really exciting. And that, by the way, is critical for the Florida Panther. This is uh now, I have not seen one in Big Cypress. Uh, I've seen one before in the Everglades, but not in Big Cypress, and they're not that common. And by the way, it's just a fun little fact. They're known as the Florida Panther. But Florida Panthers, Panthers alone, have a variety of different names based on where you are in the country. There's the Florida Panther, there's the Panther, there's the Cougar, there's the mountain lion, which is what it was called all the years that I lived in California. Um, matter of fact, growing up, I thought the panther was a different animal than the mountain lion, and it really isn't. And then they're also known as a catamount, uh, which is the um uh the mascot for uh Vermont University, which is where my niece went. So she was a catamount. But if you're looking to see gators, and that's why you're here, uh there is no better place in the country than Big Cypress, and no better place inside Big Cypress than something called the Loop. The loop is a 25-mile and 25, 24-mile road. It circles around kind of in a in a U shape, if you will. Um, the critical part for the gators are about from mile five to about mile 15. In fact, most times when I go out, I will, you know, kind of just blow through the first five miles safely because there's a lot of animals out there. But I start really looking about mile five, and then about 15, I'll turn around and go back. And I'll do that as often as I can. So it's not really a loop for me anymore, as much as it is kind of an in and out. Um, if you're gonna go visit, the best month to go is April. The reason for that now, you can see the gators year-round, so that's exciting. You go there anytime, you're gonna see gators, but the best month to see them is April. Why? It's because that's the dry season. We'll throw a video up here of what the dry season looks like. So when you're driving along the loop road, once you hit that five-mile mark or so, there are canals uh on both sides of the road. Now, the road is not real wide, maybe 20 feet wide, dirt road, flat, um, easy to drive, by the way. And um, as you go through, there are a number of bridges. I think there's 32, but they're not bridges where you're elevated, they're bridges where water culverts go underneath them, so the water can transfer from one side of the road to the other and not become trapped on one side or the other. But in April, uh that's the dry season. There hasn't been a lot of rain, not a lot of water. So these canals are drying up. I throw a video up right now, and you can take a peek at what this looks like in the dry season. And the advantage for us is that that concentrates the gators into smaller and smaller areas. So when you find them, you're likely to find more than one. Whereas when those canals are full and deep, the gators can hide underneath, they can spread out, they can hide behind the big cypress trees. There's a lot going on. And gators are important in the dry season for other animals. They create gator holes, um, similar to, say, a bison wallow, you know, where a bison gets down and rolls and creates this wallow. Um, gators do something similar. They create these holes where water gathers. And it's not just water that gathers. You get fish, you get turtles, you get birds, you get mammals, you get all kinds of stuff where these uh big old gators are digging out these holes. So that's an important thing. And like I said, when I say big old gators, 13 foot max, that's the male. They're bigger than the females. 800 pounds is normally the top end, not frequent, but normally. Um, and they'll live to be 50 or 70 years old. So they're they're long-lived. Now, when you're driving through the loop, you're gonna see gators in the ponds and in the canals. If you go during the year when the canals are moving, you'll see the gators in the canals, you'll see them in the ponds, you'll see them on the side of the road on the embankments. You'll actually see them on the road. Um, they love to sun on the road. There's a lot of gravel on the road, and um you'll get to see the gators up on the road. And you drive up and you start to drive close. And um again, they don't sprint off the road, which they can do. They can reach a top speed of about 20 miles an hour for a very short distance, but they are powerful and fast and strong. Um, but they just kind of mosey off on their own and off they go. Now, I'm gonna show you one of the ponds right now. Uh, this is an empty pond, but it it sticks with our prehistoric um kind of trend in this show today, with the alligators being, in my view, prehistoric. Um, but if you look at this pond, it's empty, or I can't see any gators. Maybe one of the viewers will spot one, but you look and there's there's the moss and the Spanish moss and the cypress trees and the cypress knees and and the water and the little island and all this stuff going on. And you just feel like you're going back in time. Um, at least I do. I mean, it's just it's a wicked thing to see. With or without gators, it's pretty cool, but you will see plenty of gators. Now, you might also see some white-tailed deer. I've seen those. There are wild hogs out there. I have not seen those. Plenty of birds, lots of herons and ibises, red-shouldered hawks are remarkably common going through the loop. If you go a mile without seeing a red-shouldered hawk, you've gone a long time. And another bird uh that I relate to prehistoric is the woodstork. Um, they just look prehistoric to me. There should be a picture of one up right now. And they're just so cool to look at, and they're beautiful, and I and I love them. You don't see a lot of them, um, but you do get to see some, and it's kind of cool when you do. Now, you're looking at a video right now of a couple of gators that seem to be friendly. Um, they are stacked on top of each other. Now, they are across the canal. So where I'm taking this video, um I'm at the edge of the road. I'm 15 feet away from these gators. And at some point in this video, it's going to sweep to the left. There's going to be a large gator. That one looks to me to be about 10 feet. That's the biggest gator I saw uh on this particular day that we're talking about. Um, but seeing these two stacked together was pretty cool. And by the way, I made a couple of out and backs. I was out there for probably six hours total. Those gators were there the entire time. They were there the first time through, they were there the last time back. Uh they had found a place where they were comfortable, they were getting sun, they enjoyed each other's company. Um, they looked to be about six, seven feet, and they were there the entire day. And now when I talked about getting to see a lot of gators, let me give you an idea. When you do the loop, yeah, like I said, you got from mile five to roughly mile 15, um, both sides, you're getting gators. So I was on my second or third trip through. I get there early. The gators normally wake up around mid-morning. They want the sun, right? So they're cold-blooded, both literally and figuratively. They need to warm their blood to be able to get moving and go hunting or do the things that they're going to do. Um, and then they're also cold-blooded in the way that we think of cold-blooded killers. Um, again, they're an apex predator, and they don't seem to care about much other than eating and sunning and sleeping. But I started another loop at the five-mile mark at about 11.45, and I drove through to one end and turned around and came back to the five-mile. So, um, and I was out there 90 minutes from 1145 to 115, and I counted 60 alligators, 6-0. I mean, it was just remarkable. There were multiple alligators in certain ponds. There were tons of single alligators. There were alligators on the road on the way out, there were alligators on the road on the way back. I don't know why, but I really like them when they're on the embankment. Um, they look very cool. And they crawl up the embankment. They have what are called gator slides. So these gator slides are like little deer trails, right? They don't want to have to break new ground every time. So they go up and down these same slides and they and you can find them easily. And you need to be careful because as big as they are and the dark gray color and all those things, um, they still seem to be able to hide themselves pretty well. So you want to be careful as you approach one of these gator slides. But they'll come up out of the water, up the gator slide. And then if I'm out walking, if you're out walking along the loop and you come close to this and you see this, it just slowly backs into the water. It's not moving fast, it's not anxious, but they just move back in the water and and and then it's gone. And to me, they appear and disappear like ghosts or smoke. Um, one minute you're there and there's no gator, and you look away, and then you look back, and then there's a gator there, which means it was there the whole time, you just didn't notice it. And they'll slowly rise and they'll slowly drop, and and there's no sound, there's no ripple in the water. It's just the gator moving the way they do. And so it is just you'll want to watch that. If you find a pond with three, four, five gators, settle in for a little bit. I carry a chair in the back of my truck everywhere I go, everywhere I travel. If I'm flying somewhere, first thing I do when I land is after I get my rent a car is I run to a local, you know, gas station or Walmart or something, grab a case of water and a cheap chair, and I carry that around. And then at the end of whatever that trip is, I give the chair awar chair away to somebody that I find. And if there's any water left over, of course I give those away too. Um but if you sit in and watch, you'll just kind of see the way these gators go. Their life seems to be slow, of course, until it's not, until they explode, um, going after prey. But when they're just in these canals and and they're full and they're sated and the sun's up and stuff, they'll just kind of drop down and come back up and maybe they'll swim just a little bit, um, which is very cool to see. You know, they take their forelimbs and kind of roll them backwards against their side, and then it's their tail that's doing the paddling and moving them along. Um, it's it's pretty wicked. Now, Florida is a cool place because in addition to alligators, we have crocodiles. Now, crocodiles are different than alligators, they're related, they're cousins, but they're different animals. Crocodiles have more of a narrow V-pointed snout. Um, I'll throw a picture of one up here, but their teeth show when their mouth is closed, unlike a gator, when their mouth is closed, um, their teeth uh are hidden. Although a lot of times when gators are sunning, you'll see them with their mouth open. And I will throw a picture of that up right here with the mouth open, and then you get to see all those teeth. Um crocodiles like saltwater, they can live in saltwater and brackish water, so they don't make it up to like big cypress. They're down around the coastline. And there's actually transition places where there are both gators and crocodiles. Um, so that's pretty wild. They're longer than gators, and um, I've not seen a crocodile in Florida. I've seen them in Kenya, and I've seen them in Costa Rica. Um, and there's a picture of one up now from I think from Kenya. Um, and they're amazing animals to see. There is another alligator besides the American alligator. It's the Chinese alligator. Surprisingly, it's found in China. Um, but that is a relative of Argator as well. But our gator, there's more of them in Louisiana than there are in Florida. There's more of them in the Everglades than there are in any other con you know, any other location. Um But the place that you want to go is Big Cypress National Preserve. You can stay in Naples or you can stay in Everglades City. Um, if you're down there, you could certainly go to the Everglades, and you will see gators. You know, they're they're out there as well, just not in these kinds of concentrations. And I encourage you to do it. Take some pictures, spend some time with them, do a little more than just drive by them because they're really magnificent animals, uh, reaching some sort of of natural perfection, I think. All right, throwing my email up here as we draw to a close, Scott at naturally scott.com. I encourage you to email me. I've got more and more people doing it now, which is very exciting for me. I love the fact that that people are emailing me because I love to hear from you guys. Um what's next up? The next adventure. We're gonna stay in southern Florida and we're gonna do the Florida manatees, which are a whole different thing than alligators. They're one of the most passive, least aggressive large animals in the world, but they are a blast to see, and we're gonna talk about that. Now, we are focusing our podcasts um on the visual. Um, and so um I'm hoping that you're watching this on Apple or Spotify so that you can see the videos and the photographs. And frankly, we're just counting on that as we talk to you. If you're watching us on YouTube, do me a favor and subscribe. Um, it doesn't cost you anything, it doesn't take any time. Just hit the subscribe button. But every time you do that, YouTube pushes this thing out to more and more people. And I think the more people we can share this with, the more people we can make friends with through the podcast, the better off we are. If you've got a comment, if you like the show and you want to hit that, go ahead. Now, I have a regular closing that I do with all my podcasts, whether my guests are animals or humans, and I open with get outside. And I gotta tell you just a quick story. This morning as I was getting ready to record this, I heard a thump against the glass. That's usually a bad sign. Usually means a bird has hit a window. Um, so I went running out to check to see what had happened. Turns out it was inside the house. It was a Carolina wren. Um, if you're not familiar with Carolina wrens, uh there's a couple of things. Number one, they are probably the loudest bird in the world per ounce that exists. Their song is so loud. And number two, they won't nest anywhere when it's nesting season. I've had them nest in my truck. If I've gone out of town for a week, you open up the garage for the day, you'll come home, they'll be starting a nest in there. And if you leave the door open like I did this morning for the dog, this wren flew in the house. Probably took me about a half an hour to catch it and get it out. But it was safe, it was fine, if you're if you're wondering. Um, so it's not all gators, sometimes it's just a little Carolina wren. But do get outside. Get outside through your back porch, your front yard, your local park, a national park, travel internationally, whatever it is, wherever you go, whatever you're doing, you're gonna see something great. You're gonna experience something different. Even if it's the 100th time you've been to your local park, you're going to see here or experience something different, and that's pretty cool. And every time you do, I encourage you, I beg you to stay safe and stay curious. Thank you so much for being a part of the Naturally Scott Podcast. I hope you're enjoying these adventure shows. Please let me know if you are. Send me a note. I'd love to hear from you. Have yourself a fantastic day. Stay curious. I'll see you next week.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

You've been listening to Naturally Scott with Scott Harris. Naturally Scott is hosted by Scott Harris, produced by Justin Harris, directed and edited by Frank Sierra. Follow us on our YouTube channel at Naturally Scott and Instagram at Naturally Scott Harris. If this conversation resonated with you, please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Naturally Scott thanks you for viewing and listening to this podcast.