The slide show continues: Alligator Farm

Having mentioned this place in a couple of posts, some explication might be in order.

The Alligator Farm has been a tourist attraction in the St. Augustine area since sometime in the 1890s. It started off in one location, then moved to its current site in the 1930s. It began as one of those typical cheesy roadside attraction places -- get your picture taken with a 'gator! -- but at some point the owners figured out they needed a raison d'etre that was a little more high-class than simply the desire to part tourists from their dollars.  

The Alligator Farm decided to transition into being not just a tourist trap, but an educational facility dedicated to the study and preservation of members of the order Crocodilia. The management cooperates with National Geographic, conservation organizations, and universities on research and preservation projects, and the live animal collection now includes representatives of all 21 members of the order Crocodilia, including some really strange looking ones, like gharials from India.

What they have the most of, of course, are American alligators, including albino 'gators:

The Alligator Farm has a few other critters in its collection, like some remarkably ugly birds from Africa, various snakes (e.g., a king cobra), a komodo dragon, and Galapagos tortoises.

The park is nicely done. It's laid out in a way that means you never have to backtrack (unless it's by choice), the interpretive signage is quite good, and it really is more than just alligators, although the Crocodilian theme is everywhere:  in the art, the signage, benches, even door handles:

The doors, incidentally, lead into a building where a humongous stuffed New Guinea crocodile (Gomek) is on display. The beast was captured in New Guinea in the 1980s and sold to a private collector, who then sold him to the Alligator Farm. Gomek was apparently quite docile for a salt-water crocodile (all crocodiles are more aggressive than the typical alligator, and salt-water crocodiles especially so) so keepers were able to get quite close to him to do feeding demonstrations. Park visitors loved it. Gomek died of old age at a length of over 17 feet -- I watched the video tape of Gomek being handed nutrias and decided the keeper was flatout insane to be on the same side of the fence. But then I thought the keeper in the alligator pen busy handing out dead white rats was pretty crazy, too. 

Then again, he was pretty careful about not turning his back on the ones that were closest to him. The enclosure had a total of about 50 large alligators; ten of them each get tossed a rat when they do the shows, which means they're all guaranteed some fur and bone to crunch on a couple times per week, but their normal diet consists of alligator chow -- a mix of various ingredients that's been developed to include all the nutrients 'gators require and that apparently comes in bars about the size of motel-room soaps.

Another part of the park has a boardwalk over water filled with gators -- there are dispensers where for a quarter you get a small handful of alligator chow pellets you can toss at the beasts. I had no real interest in watching 'gators gathering like koi to wait for a handout, but that definitely wasn't true of all park visitors. The beasts have gotten so used to the handouts that if you pause to lean on the railing and just contemplate the view, pretty quickly there's a whole herd of 'gators in the water below, all doing the reptilian equivalent of a "feed me, feed me" dance. 

All in all, I thought the place gave good value for the cost of admission. Don't know if I'd go back unless I happened to have one of the grandkids in tow, but I'll recommend it to anyone else heading for St. Augustine for a weekend.

Random thoughts

We spent Presidents Day weekend in St. Augustine, Florida, extreme eastern end of the Spanish el camino Real (the other end's in San Diego), one of the all-time tourist meccas, and home of the famous Alligator Farm. It occurred to me (again) that one of the many things I have to be thankful for is that I'm not stuck working in a public contact job in a town that depends on tourism to survive. Sitting and watching the hordes of tourists for awhile can convince almost anyone that whenever humanity's evolutionary peak occurred, we're well past it now and are quickly sliding back down into the muck.

It also struck me while tourist watching that, wow, we really are a Fat, Fat nation. I'm one of those people who tends to be a skeptic about the much hyped and dreaded Obesity Epidemic and what it's doing to us as a country, but, holy shit, there are a lot of unbelievably fat young people wandering around. It can't just be the fast food and ready availability of empty calories; there's got to be something environmental happening -- either that, or we're devolving into shmoos. 

Other stuff I learned:  Really tall lighthouses are hard to photograph. If you're close enough to see the stuff at the base, you're too close to get a non-distorted shot of the whole thing. The St. Augustine light has a focal plane of 161 feet so you spend a lot of time working on developing a nice crick in your neck while wandering around the grounds trying to figure out the best angles from which to mediate the experience through technology. The light does, however, have its original 1874 first order Fresnel still sitting in it, still lit every every night, and looking really nifty after sunset.

The least crowded space on a sunny February weekend in St. Augustine is the beach. All the tourists are back in town stocking up on overpriced chocolate and tacky, tacky souvenirs made in Spain and Mexico, as well as the inevitable dried alligator heads.

And, for what it's worth, seeing a whole lot of live alligators en masse is more than a bit creepy. Yeah, they're remarkably slow and awkward out of the water, so even I could probably outrun one, but I still don't ever want to come close enough to any in the wild to put it to the test.