Deer hunter bags a 3-foot gator…in Minnesota!

No one is surprised when an eight-foot gator climbs out of a South Carolina water hazard and trapes across a tee box. But it’s not quite as common in Minnesota.

A three-foot alligator emerged 10 feet in front of Cory Klocek when he was hunting near East Bethel on Saturday’s opener.

It being 2020, this strange encounter led Klocek to contact the DNR. He was given permission by a game warden to shoot the gator.

An alligator? In Minnesota?

Apparently, someone had released the reptile into the wild after it had outgrown its pet size.

Growing up in northeastern Minnesota the opening day of rifle deer hunting season was euphoric for most hunters. Everyone had plans for the opener.

My opening weekend generally included a trip to Blackduck where I joined my uncle, cousin and brother-in-law. We’d all spent weekends building stands and clearing shooting lanes. We would all be fanning out in a huge tract of land near Funkley that was heavily populated with whitetail. (Not a gator in sight.)

However, in all of my years of tracking, posting, driving and sitting in a deer stand I have never encountered what a Minnesota hunter ran into while tracking a whitetail buck.

Yes, Klocek did manage to bag a deer – a 10-point buck.

Klocek said he plans to mount the gator with the buck he bagged.

Is anyone willing to bet how that gator grows (as the story is passed along) over time? Just sayin’, a tale like that is bound to be the subject at many deer camps in the future.

In case anyone out there is alarmed by the fact that the deer hunter shot the gator, the critter is considered an invasive species. Anyway, that 3-foot bone crusher would never have survived a winter in the frozen tundra of Minnesota!

Most of us, deer hunter or not, will be glad when Dec. 31, 2020 gives way to Jan. 1, 2021.

Minnesota gator

If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else's eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive.

Mark Twain