Surveying For Alligators

In the 1950’s, conservation education and field biology meant logging a lot of time outside of the office, collecting data and encountering wildlife first-hand on many national wildlife refuges. Here, in September 1950, Robert “Bob” Hines, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s first and only national wildlife artist, takes to the swamp waters of Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia with refuge patrolman Jewett Hall, night surveying, probably for alligators. Okefenokee is one of the National Wildlife Refuge System’s premier units, created in 1937 to protect the rare and mysterious Okefenokee Swamp, a 396,000-acre freshwater bog where researchers study everything from bacteria to black bears. This was an area of prehistoric Native American settlement, and the place from which the Seminoles were driven into Florida by 1850.