Washington County Enterprise-Leader
Alligator Takes Refuge With Humans
FARMINGTON — In an episode that won’t be seen on “Swamp People,” Donald “Doc” Doughty takes pride in his lineage showing compassion for creatures of the swamp.
“Doc,” a resident of Farmington’s Peachtree Village, a retirement and assisted living facility, delights in telling the story of a small alligator taking refuge among the family watercraft owned by his son, Jeff Doughty, and Jeff ’s wife Nita to escape getting devoured by larger alligators after a spring flood in Louisiana.
“Doc” is a man of the cloth, a retired Baptist pastor, who preached all over the northern part of Louisiana above Monroe and below Alexandria not including Bayou Sorrel where Jeff Doughty resides about 55 minutes northwest of Thibodaux, Louisiana.
Encountering alligators just comes with the territory when living in bayou country, but as the late Jerry Reed crooned in his hit single, “Amos Moses” released Oct. 19, 1970, “It ain’t legal hunting alligator down in the swamp,” and Louisiana folks know they can’t hunt them outside of hunting season no matter how much of a nuisance the alligators make.
Spring Flood Surge
Problem was Bayou Sorrel and communities along the Port Allen Alternate Route of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) experienced in excess of 30 inches of rain over a 60-day period this spring.
Alligators share the habitation, bounded to the east by the Mississippi River levee and on the west by the Morganza Floodway’s eastern levee, which flooded because rainwater can’t just run off anywhere. The whole watershed along Bayou Sorrel and within the lower end of Iberville Parish must drain through Bayou Sorrel Lock and a tiny, silted-in loop bypass.
According to “The Waterways Journal,” the lock closed due to high water for 10 days beginning in mid-April, and shut down again May 12. As water levels in the Atchafalaya Basin, which includes the Morganza Spillway, stayed higher than the water on the land side of Bayou Sorrel Lock, the lock remained closed, not allowing water to drain.
At the lower end of the waterway, Iberville Parish emergency management operations set up a temporary “AquaDam,” a rubber tube filled with water, along State Highway 75 in mid-May to help contain the swollen bayou, but it was breached on May 21, creating a circumstance that even Jerry Reed hadn’t conjured up in a lyric with floodwaters effectively rolling the AquaDam down the road.
Worse yet, the mishap sent a 2-foot wall of water over the highway, threatening homes and businesses.
A combined effort between residents of Bayou Sorrel and Bayou Pigeon, working with the state, placed concrete barriers lined with sandbags along the bayou, stopping the water’s advance. Emergency management implementations included evacuations for hundreds of residents.
Small Pet Alligator
The State of Louisiana outlawed killing alligators. An exception to that, featured in the television series “Swamp People,” follows professional alligator hunters, who can legally hunt during an annual hunting season.
Last year the 2020 Louisiana alligator hunting season was extended from 30 to 60 days, ending in late October in both east and west zones. According to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) website, hunting in the east zone concluded Oct. 24 and went through Oct. 31 in the west zone. The state is split into east and west zones. The east zone is comprised of parishes or counties in the tip of the boot.
“You can only trap them down there now, so there’s an overabundance of alligators that are there where my son lives and no one can kill them so the big alligators during that flood, they came out eating everything,” Doc said.
Jeff Doughty had an alligator hanging out under his boat landing. Last year the alligator was judged to be about 3 feet in length. So far, the little alligator hasn’t been given a name. The reptile kept hanging out, so, according to Doc, the creature got treated like a pet.
As “Doc” puts it, Jeff Doughty used to show the alligator to little children that would come by his house and he’d put a rope on the little alligator and pull him up and hold him for the kids to pet.
Large Alligator Menace
That was last year. Now the alligator has grown to 4 feet, but is dwarfed by the larger alligators.
“The flood this year caused the big alligators to come out and they were eating the little ones,” Doc said, explaining one day Jeff went out and he had about 2 inches of water in his yard on Bayou Sorrel near where Troy Landry, one of the stars of “Swamp People,” lives.
“And that little alligator, there he was, so my son threw him out of the way,” said Doughty, father of Prairie Grove superintendent Reba Holmes.
The next day that little alligator had got back on top of the boat ramp and, according to Doc, fell off purposely into a boat belonging to Nita Doughty for safety, to keep from getting eaten by the big alligators.