For the DeJean family in Bayou Gauche, hunting alligators has been a family affair since 1979.
Their 15,000 acres are full of the reptiles, but not as full as they used to be.
Over the last two years, a shrinking population and a shrinking price tag have kept the family from their favorite pastime, but this year they set out traps once again.
“We haven’t fished alligators in the last two years because the price has been too bad,” Jordan DeJean, 28, said. “The last two years they were offering $10 a foot for 10-foot alligators which is garbage. It’s not even worth your time putting out lines and spending money on fuel.”
But this season Jordan got $25 per foot for the alligators he caught that were over nine feet long.
“It’s not the best I’ve ever seen, but it’s better than the past two years,” he said.
Despite the price hike, Jordan and his family are still not fishing at full capacity this year. The DeJeans have permits to kill 218 alligators on their property, which they divide up. They decided to only hunt for half that this year to allow the alligator population to grow.
Jordan said he’s just glad to be back in the game. He prepared two weeks in advance for the hunting season – sharpening poles and putting out line traps.
“Preparation is everything – hunting them is the easy part,” he said. “It’s always exciting when you pull up to a line and you see it down, see the vegetation all torn up…that’s my favorite part – just seeing what you’re going to pull up on the other end of that line.”
Jordan has never been attacked by a live alligator, but he has been surprised by some dead ones.
“Sometimes when you shoot them, their nerves don’t quite stop right away,” Jordan said. “(This year) I was going to cut one of the dead alligators’ tails to put the tag on and he jumped overboard. I went out of the boat after him too because when you shoot them, they sink to the bottom so you’re not going to find them.
“I got him though – I got him back in the boat and tagged him.”
Jordan’s father, Joel DeJean, taught him to hunt alligator when he was six years old. Once he was 15 years old, Jordan was able to hunt on his own. Joel was the original hunter, but now he hunts for a different type of prey: alligator eggs.
Once a year, the DeJeans rent an airplane and mark the nests from the air using GPS. Then they hop an on airboat to go pick up the eggs they saw from the sky.
Like the adult population on their land, alligator eggs are also becoming scarcer.
“(In the 80s) we were picking up around 5,000 eggs at a time,” Joel said. “This year, we got 471. That’s as many as we could find.”
Joel said that more people owning airboats now means more people hunting female alligators in the swamps. Less female alligators mean fewer eggs for Joel to find.
Even though Joel is hunting alligators that haven’t even been born yet, he has his share of danger in the hunt.
“I had one female alligator jump in my boat one time – coming after me,” he said, laughing, but he has never been bitten. “We usually take two people – one has a long pole to keep the female at bay while the other guy robs the nest.”
Once Joel has collected the alligator eggs, he incubates them on his property until they hatch. Once hatched, he sells most of them to an alligator farm. However, about 14 percent of the newborns are given to the alligator farm for free. Once the 14 percent are four feet long, the farm returns them to the DeJean family to release into the wild on their property.
Thanks to their efforts to keep the population up on their property, the DeJeans had a successful hunting season this year and have saved some of the game for future generations.
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