On a car trip with a couple of friends last week, I was telling them about a TV show about the Everglades and how gators move into the potholes during the dry season. Egrets nest in the trees around those ponds and will fly down to scoop floating sticks to use in building the nests. They showed an alligator floating along with a stick across its snout, and when an egret swooped down it grabbed the bird and took it underwater, including an underwater shot of the gator with the bird. The narrator said they had heard stories about gators doing this, but it had never been filmed.

Then one of my friends told me that some years ago he was walking along the shore of a pond in Hilton Head near some condos. A three-year-old boy was standing at the edge of the pond, and threw a tennis ball into the water. A gator surfaced by the ball, took it into his mouth, brought it in near the waterline, dropped it there, and backed off a couple of feet. My friend called to the boy’s father who was in the background, telling him that there was a gator and it would eat his boy. As the father approached the boy, the gator submerged and swam away.

My friend was convinced that the gator was trying to entice the boy to come closer to pick up the tennis ball.

I don’t know if he is right, but I’m thinking that maybe gators can be cunning.