Last month, Bear Hollow Wildlife Trail at Memorial Park lost a beloved member of its zoo family. Dill Pickle the alligator passed away in late January due to a suspected bacterial infection.

The autopsy report is underway. 

From being confiscated from a South Carolina classroom as a hatchling by the South Carolina Fish and Wildlife Division, Dill Pickle found her permanent home at Bear Hollow due to her inability to survive in the wild.

Dill Pickle was one of the three alligators residing at Bear Hollow

But even in captivity, Dill Pickle never lost her feisty demeanor and will be remembered as a strong, independent spirit by all who knew her. 

Handler and Bear Hollow Zoological Coordinator Berkeley Boone befriended Dill Pickle as a young alligator in the Reptile Center and watched her grow from small hatchling to full fledged gator, at which point she was relocated to an outside enclosure. 

He said Dill Pickle was always firm in her alligator identity, even as a baby, and refused to compromise her high level of reptilian pride. 

“She was not as imprinted as the two other alligators she lived with; she wouldn’t put up with as much,” he said. “When someone would be in her area working and got too close she would always get irritated, hiss and walk away but she was never violent.”

Her strong “don’t mess with me” attitude will be missed now that she has moved onto the big swamp in the sky where the water is always calm and the rocks warm: alligator heaven.