This is one of the first photos I took when I got my SLR. As soon as I could, I made a trip over to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm. It's a place I absolutely adore, perhaps because I'm smitten with alligators. The are just powerhouses, keystones in the ecosystems they are a part of, and products of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. They're perfect at what they do, and they manage it with grace and elegance.

When I did research on gators one of the best parts was getting to handle them. I couldn't manage anything over 2.5-3 feet alone because they were so strong and incredibly fast. If you hesitated even a split second, your hands were in the gator's mouth. Even some hatchlings would jump out of the egg, grab my pinky, and go into a death roll.

One thing that always amazed me was how smooth and soft their skin is. It makes sense, but we so often see them as so gritty and harsh. They are in fact quite tender when they want to be, and wonderful mothers.

This is the left hind leg of a 5-6 foot gator that resided in the swamp that's part of the gator farm. I've reprocessed it from the original; hopefully it's an improvement.

Color version: [link]