Bob Sanders: Jungle creatures on our doorstep

I’ll tell you, if it ain’t one dad-burned thing it’s another.

Over decades, centuries, even, we’ve been invaded by starlings and rats and sparrows (I never understood why the English didn’t bring nightingales instead of starlings and sparrows), and kudzu and Japanese privet and walking catfish ... and recently, snakehead fish, which are supposed to eat up everything in the water.

We’ve kind of learned to live with sparrows (keep mules and horses off the streets) and starlings, and you don’t hear much about walking catfish. But we have some other threatening things to talk about.

I expect any week to pick up my copy of the Lamar County Democrat and find that alligators have been seen in Yellow Creek, eating pets, livestock and people. Not yet, but any time.

And there’s the decades-old question: do we have panthers in Alabama? The official answer is no, but you keep hearing reports: Fellow at the Geneva Street Think Tank claims he sees them all the time. Somebody will see one in town one of these days. By the way, to the uninformed, a panther is exactly the same beast as a catamount, a cougar, a mountain lion and a puma. People in the south usually call them panthers. There are no black ones. If it’s black, it’s something else.

While they have been known to attack humans, they generally hunt deer, and Lord knows, they could live high on the hog around here. They should go through an orientation course: Eat deer. Do not eat cows.

Speaking of hogs, wild hogs are becoming increasingly troublesome, breeding like flies and rooting up everything. So far, they have been active mostly in Florida and south Alabama, but their range is expanding. Hmm ... panthers might like a little pork with their venison and steak. These hogs are simply once-domesticated ones that have gone wild. And they very quickly revert to the feral stage, growing tusks and foraging relentlessly and being very defensive about their piglets.

Now, as if we didn’t have enough problems ... with highland moccasins and water moccasins and rattlers, comes word that Burmese Pythons are on the rampage in Florida and proliferating like crazy. These babies can get to be over 20 feet long; and they just love pet puppies and cats (as do alligators), and would no doubt enjoy a nice mess of human, if the opportunity presented itself. They are not poisonous, but being bitten by those huge teeth in that huge head wouldn’t be a joyful event; and then they wrap around you and start squeezing and squeezing and squeezing ...

I don’t know much about pythons, but me’n Bomba the Jungle Boy used to have a lot of trouble with the similar boa constrictors and anacondas. Bad news.

So, be on the lookout for panthers, wild hogs, alligators, hoop snakes, and now ... hold it! Something else, coral snakes. Circle the wagons!

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.