SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR
Reggie’s capture ends his life at large, but begins his new life living large
Second in a two-part series.
LOS ANGELES — It’s not that Reggie was an extraordinarily canny alligator, craftily outwitting his would-be captors. He was just a regular alligator, behaving as an alligator would in a setting far more suited to his needs than to those of his pursuers.
The odds were always in Reggie’s favor.
Lake Machado in Harbor City was the size of 15 Costcos. Food was abundant. If Reggie perceived a sound or movement as threatening, he simply swam away.
The lake was so amenable to alligators that firefighters found a second gator in an adjacent flood channel during the search, one too small to be Reggie. It was quietly transferred to an animal sanctuary while the pursuit continued.
“It’s like a needle in a haystack, except the needle can move any direction at 30 miles an hour,” Young said. “The less commotion there is here, more likely we’re going to see it.”
But there was always commotion. The crowds around the lake were near-constant, which meant any gator-hunting efforts happened in full view of an audience. Media helicopters chopped overhead, scaring Reggie back into the water before wranglers could grab him.
“It was the biggest fiasco
I’d ever seen,” recalled Flavio Morrissiey, a member of the Gatorland crew. “It wasn’t that big! We would not consider that a threat. But I guess in California you would consider that news.”
The gator is captured
Winter came, and Reggie disappeared.
As temperatures fall, alligators’ metabolisms plummet; they eat and move much less. They tend to spend this vulnerable period sheltering on land or underwater, where they can stay up to an hour without coming up for air.
On May 24, 2007, a few weeks after his first confirmed sighting in more than a year, Reggie crawled out of the water to sun himself on a bank just inside the chain-link fence. It was the best shot yet at his capture.
Ian Recchio, the Los Angeles Zoo’s reptile curator, rushed to the park and found a 7½-foot-long alligator strong and lean from life in the wild. Reggie was cornered, and was as agitated as a young male alligator can be.
This, Recchio realized, was not a one-person job. He turned to a huddle of young, burly park employees.
“I said, ‘Have you ever watched ‘The Croc Hunter?’” And one of the guys goes, ‘Yeah,’” Recchio said. He had his wingman.
Recchio scaled the fence and secured Reggie’s head with a dog-catching pole lent to him by animal control. The park employee followed, and together they pinned the gator to the ground. With the help of a second daring park employee, Recchio duct-taped the gator’s jaws and wrapped a T-shirt around his eyes.
Then they lay there, three men and a gator, until firefighters arrived with a spine board sturdy enough to support the renegade reptile.
Reggie was loaded into an animal control truck for the 30-mile trip to the zoo. TV stations carried live footage of the journey.
The gator in captivity
Once at the zoo, Reggie was treated for parasites and placed into quarantine. Tests confirmed the long-held assumption that he was male. A vacant enclosure formerly occupied by flamingos was deemed an ideal alligator habitat.
On his first day before the public, Reggie was greeted by a cheering crowd. He crept into the wading pool and hid behind a rock.
On the sixth day, he escaped. Reggie had done in his new habitat what he most likely had done upon entering Lake Machado. He explored his surroundings. He looked for food and places to hide. He checked for other alligators that might want a piece of his territory.
It was August, and the coldblooded animal’s energy was at its peak. When Reggie came to a chain-link fence more than 4 feet tall — one that “alligators really shouldn’t be able to get over,” Recchio said — he started climbing.
Zoo staff making the morning rounds found an empty alligator enclosure around 7:30 a.m. “That’s obviously a big deal,” Recchio said.
Fortunately, alligators are a lot easier to track on land. Reptile curators followed the trail of tail-drag marks and gator footprints (five toes on the front feet, four webbed ones on the back) to a loading dock about 500 yards away where Reggie had paused to rest.
He soon returned to public view, behind a taller fence. And there he has remained.
In 2010, the zoo introduced Reggie to Cajun Kate, an American alligator previously located in a different enclosure. Newspapers celebrated the “life partners.”
The reality of alligator relationships is a lot more complicated.
Alligators raised together in captivity can generally cohabitate peacefully. Attempting to introduce an adult alligator into another’s territory is almost always a disaster. “Reggie tried to kill her,” Recchio said, and Kate was sent to an animal sanctuary in Florida.
The zoo tried again in 2016 with Tina, an American alligator outgrowing her lodgings at the Pasadena Humane Society. Both animals showed aggressive behaviors to the other at first. But as winter approached and their metabolism slowed, they relaxed. When spring came around, the pair seemed comfortable with each other. Reggie likes Tina and hisses protectively at people who get close to her.
Coda
Reggie is now about 8 feet long and 250 pounds. He’s probably around 30 years old and could live 50 more years in captivity.
There are dozens of ways Reggie’s story could have ended, almost all of them bad. He could have been sickened or killed in the lake. He could have harmed a pet or a person. Do not expect things to turn out fine if you set an alligator loose in a public park.
Reggie never asked for any of this.
He is as alligator-like as alligators come, Recchio likes to say. The one thing that makes him different is that, for a while, he was a star in L.A.