It was a picture-perfect Friday morning along the Peconic River when Frank Naase unwittingly became a member of an exclusive — and expanding — Long Island club.
“Sometimes I stop by the river, get a cup of coffee and watch the water,” says Naase, 50, an IT tech at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Only on this day, two weeks ago, the mighty Peconic stirred with a beast that was neither fish nor fowl.
“I’m standing there on the boat ramp, listening to the water running by, and I look down and there’s an alligator — a little one — touching the bank.
“My first reaction is to take out my BlackBerry and take a photo because no one’s going to believe me.”
He called the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which quickly dispatched two officers to catch the reptile.
“We pulled the first one out, and while we were talking, we see another one swimming by,” Naase recalls.
“We went to get the second one, and we walked along this path, and we heard some splashing, and we saw it in the water, and then we see another one sunning itself on the bank.”
“So we went for that one and it jumped in the water, and then we got the second one, and as we were standing looking at the one that jumped in the water, another one comes swimming up!” Naase says
“I didn’t imagine I’d see something like that when I woke up that morning.”
“It was like a parallel universe . . . I kept thinking, ‘Alligators on Long Island?’ ”
From August to November, at least nine alligators were found across Long Island. One was on a golf course in Wading River, two in a supermarket parking lot in Shirley, and another near an Applebee’s in Shirley.
Two were nabbed in Yaphank, one was found in the window well of a Southampton home, another in a park near Lake Ronkonkoma and another on the lawn of a Mastic Beach home.
Tack on the four Naase spied on April 19, the three more turned in at an illegal-reptile amnesty event in Smithtown last weekend, and the number swells like a python’s belly to 16 gators in less than a year.
That’s nearly half of the 40 alligators in total found on Long Island since 2003, says Suffolk County SPCA Chief Roy Gross.
“And these are just the ones we know about,” he adds.
All the recent captures were American alligators of roughly the same size, about 2 to 3 feet — still big enough to strip flesh from a poorly placed finger. They can grow to 14 feet, live 50 years and weigh half a ton.
Alligators can survive in water temperatures down to the low 60s but prefer 80s and 90s. They are not indigenous to New York and would not survive more than a year in the urban jungle.
Instead, they wind up in sanctuaries such as the Long Island Aquarium, which is now home to seven found or confiscated alligators, including the surviving three creatures fished out of the Peconic.
The trio — now named Bo, Luke and Cooter — were underfed and all likely to die in the river’s chilly waters had they not been found, aquarist Julian Ansell says.
But how did they get there in the first place?
Ansell says that when they hatch, gators are a reasonable 9 inches long. They grow about a foot a year, and at around the 2-foot milestone is when owners start to have second thoughts, he says.
“When it’s a baby, every animal is cute and not so dangerous,” Ansell says. “Just because you are hand-feeding it doesn’t mean it’s going to like you and it’s not going to bite you. It’s going to be a 12-foot animal — you can’t just keep that in a 55-gallon fish tank in your house.”
When The Post visited the aquarium last week, none of the gators were particularly friendly, and one — Hercules, a 3-foot alligator left on the golf course — menacingly stared down a reporter, hissing as it propped itself up on a stony perch.
“They are never going to be cuddly. Alligators make awful pets,” Ansell says.
But to some, gators are as much a part of the family as Fluffy or Spot. And a misguided fad to have them in the home may be behind the Long Island invasion.
“Alligators make great pets,” insists Steven Weinkselbaum, who was busted in 2006 after officials found a menagerie of illegal animals in his Lindenhurst home, including nine gators, a crocodile and an electric eel.
“Alligators don’t attack people, but if it bites off your finger — that’s your choice. They are completely harmless if you raise them from babies. They may bite you — but they’re not going to eat you up.”
In fact, the cold-blooded creature is a delight to have at home. “They warm up to you,” he says.
Weinkselbaum, who keeps an emu and a few turtles in Long Island, blames the law — not the gators.
Without a special state permit, owning an alligator is illegal and punishable with a $250 fine. But when they’re released, owners face criminal charges for abandonment, animal cruelty and endangering the public — carrying a penalty of one year in prison or $1,000 fine.
“If people have a pet, they’re going to let it go rather than deal with the authorities and get in trouble,” he says. “They are going into people’s homes, making them into criminals looking for these animals, so people are panicking and just releasing them so they don’t get in trouble.
“There shouldn’t be any laws against them. It’s a stupid law, it makes no sense at all.”
Gators sell for less than $100 online and are even cheaper at reptile shows, experts say. Weinkselbaum says he had as many as 12 gators and would trade them with pals if they got too big, or release them down in Florida. His biggest was a 9-footer — kept in a pond in his greenhouse.
“Everyone gets them. They get them in California. They get them in Pennsylvania. They drive them back. They order them through mail order on the Internet. You can’t control this,” Weinkselbaum says.
The 16 gators found in the past nine months is just the tip of the iceberg, he says.
“There are alligators on every block on Long Island,” notes Weinkselbaum, who says paranoid owners are now forced to go “undercover.”
“Everything is illegal — but they make nice pets.”
That’s a sentiment facing Gross and his half-dozen specially trained Emergency Animal Response team members, who corral gators and other creatures.
“People go out of state, grab them. They come back with small alligators — and then they grow,” says one member, who asked to remain anonymous because he works undercover on gator buy and busts.
Things have gotten so bad that Gross — who admits that, as a boy, even he owned a gator, a gift from an aunt who brought it up from Florida — decided to organize a first-ever amnesty event last week in Smithtown.
“Now I’m done with alligators,” says a man who turned in a 4-foot gator at the “no questions asked” event.
“It was getting too big for its enclosure. I got it as a baby and got attached to it. I just want a better home for it.”
Another amnesty event is being planned, Gross says.
But just who is responsible for littering Long Island with alligators remains a mystery.
“I don’t know of any place in the United States with this many alligators appearing in public,” says Dr. Russell Burke, a herpetologist at Hofstra University.
“The sheer number of alligators, all approximately the same size, sometimes in groups, certainly suggests that one or a couple of people ended up with juvenile alligators that became increasingly unmanageable over time,” he says. “Still, it’s surprising.”
And the broad geographic range where the animals have been disposed points to multiple offenders.
“This is a pretty diverse area, which likely means more than one person — which makes it even more of an anomaly,” Burke says.
Gross blamed TV shows such as “Gator Boys” for glorifying kinship with the dangerous animals.
“It’s become a status symbol. You see on TV people bare-handling alligators,” Gross says. “TV plays a big part in this.”
One thing Gross is certain about — his job isn’t done.
“I guarantee there are more,” he says.
Additional reporting by Dana Sauchelli