So I get an ice cream sandwich out of the freezer and settle into my chair on the balcony to watch the Saturday afternoon rain. There was a white thing floating in the pond; sometimes plastic bags blow into the water during a storm, but this looked too white and solid. But what really caught my eye was the rather large fish swimming toward it above water. I 
rapped on the glass to get Chris, who arrived on the balcony, told me to keep an eye on it and headed back in for his glasses. We thought we found a run over baby alligator once (at night) that, come daylight, turned out to be a flattened armadillo (I know, what kind of Texans don’t know that on sight?!), but it was daylight now, and the fish/armadillo/long-skinny-turtle reached the dead bird and gator-rolled it! The pond exploded into froth and a big tail flipped up into the air in the middle of it. Chris missed it. “An alligator! An alligator!” I said, then bounced through the door and downstairs. We must really be in Florida if we see alligators from our balcony!
I ran down to the edge of the pond and took some photos. Chris came down and we stood in the rain in our pajamas very pleased with Floridian entertainment. A bunch of golfers golfed by all stages of the gator whirling, ripping 
and eating his bird. None of them seemed to notice, or maybe they see this stuff all the time. Looking at the photos I noticed that this little guy’s tail is a long way behind him. Yikes! We printed it off and showed it to the apartment complex with our rent check and the manager said the maintenance guy reported seeing two alligators yesterday, a three-footer and a six-footer. Florida state law says you can’t move alligators unless they’re longer than four feet, but it’s safe to say this one was. It pushed the dead bird down the pond, conveniently in front of our office window, where he continued to munch it. Please give us a call if you are interested in watching gators from our stairwell.