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For more than forty years the naturalist Archie Carr and his family
shared the pond at the end of their garden with an alligator who, as alligators
do, grew to an alarming size. Made uneasy by the attacks on chickens and
the crunch of armadillos being devoured, Carr called in the local sherrif
and his deputy to help to move the beast. After hair-raising capsizes in
a flimsy boat, he reconsidered. Alligators everywhere in Florida are shoved
around to suit humans. Here, the humans would learn to live near the alligator.
In a delightful collection called A Naturalist in Florida (Yale University
Press, pp 264, £19.95), Carr’s essays range from encounters with
an island full of poisonous water moccasins to the puzzle of the jubilee
– a frenzied mass migration of many freshwater species at the same time.