1,500 bid for alligator permits

1,000 licenses to be awarded for fall

Alan Hawes
The Post and Courier

People are lining up to go on the hunt for alligators in South Carolina. This one is being removed from a neighborhood ditch using a tether.

Mike Tuten has his eye on an alligator, an 8-footer back up a creek off the Savannah River. If he gets a permit in the state's random drawing, that's where the Bostick Plantation hunting guide is headed.

And not with a customer. "I'm only going to be able to get one, and that's for me," he said.

As many as 1,500 people had applied for 1,000 permits to hunt alligator this fall when the S.C. Natural Resources Department this week closed out the application period for the first season in years.

That response didn't surprise hunting veterans such as Tuten. Since news got out about the season, customers keep asking at the Estill hunting lodge where he works. A customer asked Tuten to call him if he got a permit. A group of hog hunters also asked.

"Even out-of-state hunters that come here ask about it," Tuten said.

The season marks the first harvest in years on a species that thrived in the Lowcountry while it was under protection of the Endangered Species Act. The harvest is an attempt by the state to manage a population estimated at more than 100,000. People who live or boat along the waterways say it could be many more, and closer contact with humans has made them more menacing.

The season was spurred by reports of a large and growing number of alligators at Lakes Moultrie and Marion and in the Cooper River in the Charleston area. The problem was underscored last summer when a Summerville man lost his arm to an alligator while snorkeling in Lake Moultrie.

The season will run Sept. 13 through Oct. 11. The rules allow one alligator to a permit, hunted in one specified zone out of four along the coast. Hunters will not be allowed to shoot until the alligator has been securely tied off, brought alongside a boat or on land. Only alligators 4 feet or longer can be taken.

The harvest has been opposed by people who say alligators are a protected species whose wetlands habitat is being encroached on by the surging human population, and that problem alligators have been goaded or fed.

"Alligators are not endangered anymore and they're getting prolific. I don't see anything wrong with some kind of controlled harvest, and I think everybody is seeing that up and down the coast," said Scott Whitaker, director of the Coastal Conservation Association of South Carolina.

Residents along the lake where Whitaker lives in Columbia have had to ask for nuisance permits to remove large alligators, he said.

Tuten knows all about that. He used to live in Moncks Corner and has seen the alligators in the Marion-Moultrie lakes. The creek where his 8-footer waits is a regular bowfishing spot for the guide service, and a half-dozen or more alligators 6 to 8 feet are on the banks.

"Without a doubt, it'd be easy to get alligators around here," he said.

Reach Bo Petersen at 745-5852..