Smoked Nuisance Gator Tail

For 20 years alligators were listed as endangered in South Carolina, but you couldn’t prove it by me. The pond where I fished as a child used to get so overrun with alligators that we would call wildlife officials to remove them to distant locations. It was no surprise to find that often the same gators—tagged by the game officers—found their way home from some 100 miles away.

There have been so many developments along the coast of South Carolina in the past 20 years that lands once