One day while in high school, my daughter suggested she was considering a major in wildlife biology in college.

Since college majors are something one should try on for size before buying, I suggested we spend a day in the field with Walt.  She agreed.

Walt Rhodes and I had crossed paths a few times, so I knew what he did for a living. He was South Carolina’s gator biologist. He also had a multi-year study in progress that involved collecting data on the nesting habits of alligators including their newborn gators. To do this, he monitored nest temperatures and just before the eggs hatched, Walt would collect them, keep them separated by nest and hatch them in his yard. By the time the gators were born, he could have between 800-1000 baby gators chomping in Tupperware tub. Then he would put them back where they came from since gators have homing instincts. Last thing he wanted was to have all those gators returning to his house.

Our job, since we chose to accept it (imagine ‘Mission Impossible’ music here), was to dig up gator eggs.

We met Walt first thing one morning and were quickly boating through the Santee Delta marsh. Walt had GPS coordinates on the nests and had already visited them multiple times, so we were checking off our data points quickly. At each nest, we would pull in, my daughter would dig through the sand and grass the nests were made of, put the eggs in a tub, and we’d move on to the next one.  At each one, the female gator guarding the nest watched from a safe distance.

At the last nest, Walt hesitated before letting us out.

“Jim, you better dig up these. Last time I was here, the female was grumpy.”

“Define grumpy,” I responded.

“She charged,” said Walt. “What she will do is first creep up behind you, and then you’ll hear a hiss as she sucks in air to look as big as possible. That will be the point just before she charges. I’ll tap her on the nose with a boat paddle and she’ll leave.”

“Ok,” I said with mustered courage. I trusted Walt’s knowledge of gators.

Then he added, “If that doesn’t work, you run that way and I’ll run this way.”

So, I began to dig. The nest was about waist-high and looked like swamp run through a blender. Grasses, sand, and muck were in equal portions. About a foot in, I looked over my shoulder and two gator eyes had popped through the surface. I paused and watched the gator creep up the bank behind me, about eight feet away. She inhaled and opened her jaws wide. I prepared to run.

At this point, Walt tapped her on the nose. Hard. Imagine smacking a leather suitcase with a boat paddle. She slung mud with her tail, covering me in marsh muck while my daughter enjoyed all this from a safe view in the boat. The gator was invisible now but not gone. Then the eyes returned and the process repeated.

Walt had to smack the gator three times while I dug and finally found eggs. They were from the prior year. This female gator had built a new nest on top of the old one and guarded it for two seasons. No wonder she was grumpy.

So, with our day afield, Walt added about two hundred more eggs to his collection incubating in his front yard. My daughter and I had a great experience in the marsh and a female gator continued to guard a nest with old eggs.

On the way home, tired and smelling of marsh muck, we didn’t say too much as we drove. I looked over after a bit and asked,

“Do you still want to be a wildlife biologist?”

Without hesitation, my daughter looked over with a grin and replied, “Oh yeah.”

She enrolled her freshman year at Colorado State as a wildlife biology major.