re: Why did alligator prices drop

Because everybody and his brother is now an alligator hunter and the supply has started to outpace the demand?

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People were bidding 70%+ for state tags, meaning they would pay the state 70% of hide profits while they were making their money off of the people they brought on the "guided hunts."

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We were outbid on tags several years ago. Someone bid 100% for state tags. This was a couple years after swamp people had aired.

It was for Lake Bouef. I am pretty sure the two Indians from swamp people picked up those tags and I never saw a one alligator line in there that year. Now my dad just gets 2 tags for his own property. It really isn't worth the little bit of money that the skins are going for. You can make a little bit on money in the meat though.

Which fricking sucks, there are way too many wild alligators out there now.

when we first started gator hunting in MS with the draw hunts several years ago we would bring a 10ft gator to LA and get $300+ dollars for it.......this year that was more like $50 so we didnt even bring them over to sell just cleaned outselved and eating them here. Dried the heads and tossed the hides. Dern shame but it was gonna cost us more to drive them to the buyer than what we would get to sell em so i guess we just doing it for fun and meat now......and it is dern FUN.

I remember my dad making more money on the weekends trapping coons than he did working all week. But that was in the 80's. He would pay me a dollar a hide to tube em out. I bought a bunch of 22 bullets with that money. He sold the hides and the meat. A big boar would bring 30 bucks. Now we are over run with coons because no one kills them anymore.

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When I was a kid we ran lines for alligators and gathered eggs which is where the real money is/was.

Gathering eggs that’s a different story all together that is FUN!

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Who did you sell the eggs to?

Gathering the eggs seems like an adventure. Not sure how you did it back in the day. One farm I visited uses an ultralight aircraft to look for nests. They mark the area with long bamboo poles with a piece of survey ribbon on them. An airboat goes to the pole and then finds the nest. One guy digs while the other watches out for mama. They mark the tops of the eggs and collect them.

When they incubated them, they can make the egg produce a male or female by adjusting the temperature a few degrees. I thought that was pretty neat. They return a predetermined percentage back to the wild. It pretty low, like 8% or 10%, but I think that number is related to normal alligator infant mortality.

I toured the place with my out of state nephews, thinking they would enjoy it. They did, but I liked it as much as they did. It was really interesting.

Yep. 30 yrs ago it was $50.00 a foot.

That is exactly how we did it in madisonville growing up. I’ve been in the ultralight, in the airboat, and the one digging up the eggs before. My dads friend had the permits, he just brought us kids along so we could have some fun.

It’s an adrenaline rush for sure when mama comes charging out the marsh grass and you gotta haul your arse backing the air boat as fast as you can

We’ve had nests where mama never even showed up and we had nests where it didn’t matter what we tried she was charging us repeatedly

Also it was fun as hell knowing where the nests were so we could come back during teal season after teal hunts and catch little bitty baby alligators for our fish tanks at home