It's easy to forget...

...that, like whitetail deer, alligators were once pretty much extinct over much of their natural range.

When Disney World opened, the alligator was on the Endangered Species list. When I was little, it was still kind of a big deal to see a whitetail deer in the wild. Forty years later, driving the I-64 corridor from St. Louis across Illinois and Indiana to Louisville, the shoulders of the highway looked like a Bambi abattoir in places.
.