29 August 2011

Mother Gator Protects Her Young



This was taken by a visitor to my nature center last week. You can watch the mother gator helping babies hatch out of the nest at the beginning then see the drama that unfolds as a Green Heron tries to make a hathling gator a snack.

Don't miss the little baby turtle hatching in the middle of the video. A Red-bellied Slider laid her eggs in the alligator nest and they hatched on the same day!

2 comments:

Dina said...

That's amazing. I didn't realize they had so many babies. Do they all survive? There must be a low survival rate for those babies. Otherwise you'd have alligators stacked on top of each other.

Eva Matthews said...

Maybe 1 or 2 survive at most!

We also have another nest that has hatched so this will be a big year for baby alligators. The first double nest year!