CNN.com - Florida's suburban croc hunter

Gators captured when they get too close for comfort

Todd Hardwick is paid by the state of Florida to capture alligators who've become backyard menaces.

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HOMESTEAD, Florida (CNN) -- Who ya gonna call when there's an alligator in your pool or an emu in the tool shed?

Todd Hardwick has made a comfortable living in south Florida as a sort of suburban crocodile hunter. Abandoned pet pythons, alligators and more are either returned to nature or added to Todd's backyard menagerie.

And business is booming. Last year, Florida logged a record 17,000 complaints about alligators. Also a record were the three human deaths from gator encounters.

"This was a wetland for many years," Hardwick explained. "In the last two years, there's probably been [almost] 400 houses in this area that have been built."

The wildlife population has been pushed out to the perimeter canal system, but they don't always mind the boundaries.

"You have an alligator population that's going up every year. You have a human population that's going up every year. But most importantly, you have an alligator habitat shrinking," Hardwick said.

But it's just not gators that Hardwick captures. He and his company, Pesky Critters, are called upon to remove all sorts of unwanted critters. His backyard is filled with exotic pets that escape or are set free by owners that tire of them -- including emus, cockatoos, snakes, and iguanas.

Hardwick's record find came in 1989, when he crawled under a house and pulled out a 22-foot reticulated python.

He's paid by private individuals to remove the occasional snake or iguana, but when it comes to gators, the state of Florida picks up the tab.

State law mandates that any alligator more than four feet long ends up at a private plant where they are processed into meat and other products.

But the reptiles under four feet get a reprieve and are released back in the wild, away from humans.

As he released a recent capture, though, Hardwick said another call is just a matter of time.

"Even though we've got him out here away from town, he'll end up in somebody's backyard and he'll probably eventually be captured," Hardwick said. "So we'll see him again one day, I'm afraid."