SANFORD, Fla. – Police in Sanford had an unexpectedly reptilian reason for waking a few neighbors up early Thursday.
One of those neighbors provided News 6 with video showing the officers attempting to get an alligator away from a home’s front door.
The video shows the alligator quickly raising its head at one point, inching backward and appearing to growl as the officers, one of whom can be seen using a rake to lengthen their reach, reassess the situation.
“Well, he’s going the wrong way now,” an officer can be heard saying.
[WATCH: Police corral Sanford gator]
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The viewer said that officers were eventually able to relocate the unwelcome guest to a retention pond.
“Those young cops were brave. They could definitely use a trapper or have better equipment to help. I’m sure they come across this a lot, but they did a great job,” the viewer said in an email.
The viewer told News 6 that the officers were doing a routine drive-through when they saw the crook-odilian on the home’s doorstep. The gator was still in the retention pond some hours later, the viewer said, adding that she intended to notify the local HOA.
Emily Piland told News 6 reporter Catherine Silver that she woke up when two officers with Sanford police came and knocked on her window.
“The cops are banging on my living room window and they asked me if I had a stick, and I was like, ‘What’s happening?’” Piland said. “I checked my ring camera. I saw a big gator over here through my doorbell camera.”
Piland said she couldn’t open her front door, so she walked out through her back gate and gave the officers a rake.
“They basically told me they were trying to tire it out so that they could drag it back to the pond,” Piland said. “They tried to get it in this trash can. It was like a 6-foot-long gator.”
Piland said the officers spent nearly an hour with the gator before they finally got it back into the retention pond across the street.
“I just want to give props to the Sanford police officers who came out. They actually said that they were on patrol, and they were looking at everybody’s, you know, porches and kind of just watching out for crime. And that’s how they saw the gator,” Piland said.
Piland believes the alligator was likely trying to make its way to Lake Monroe nearby when it ended up at her front door.
Brandon Fisher, an alligator expert at Gatorland, said gators are on the move this time of year.
“We’re getting kind of towards the tail end of breeding season, but we’re still in it,” Fisher said. “They get up and they move, and they travel. Before, in times past, they’ve seen an alligator walking 9 miles to get from one place to the next. So, they do get up and move, especially if, you know, the water dries up, food source dries up, or they get kicked out of their territory by a bigger alligator.”
Fisher said gators will move around to find any fresh body of water that they can and they typically are most active from dusk ‘til dawn.
“They typically do more of the activity — the moving around, the hunting, the eating, the breeding — they do it typically from dusk ‘til dawn,” Fisher said. “So, definitely if you’re out and about, you’re enjoying the outdoors, you want to be cognizant of your surroundings. People love to go walking early in the morning or walking or running later in the evening when it’s cooler here in Florida. That just happens to be the time when gators are really doing a lot of their activity.”
Experts say you should give alligators their space, and if you find one close to your home, leave it alone.
“It’s going to hang out. It’s going to wait. As long as it’s nobody’s bothering it, it’s not going to bother you, and they’re going to go on their way,” Fisher said. “What you don’t want to do is, you don’t want to try to touch it. You don’t want to try to catch it. You don’t want to try and feed it. It is against the law in the state of Florida to feed or to catch a wild alligator.”
[OTHER GATOR VIDEO: Watch 8-foot gator make its way into KITCHEN]