OCHOPEE, Florida — Unexpected cold may hit the Florida Everglades late at night. The stars dot the sky. The frogs croak and croak. It’s all peace and wonder until you remember why you’re out at this hour, in a van equipped with floodlights, trying to find invasive snakes.
Python hunting may conjure up images of hunters trudging through swamps and pulling snakes out of the mud. In reality, it involves wandering the lonely roads of the Everglades, hoping to catch a glimpse of a giant viper. It is exhausting for the eyes and punishes the hours of sleep.
Python hunters love it.
“The excitement is amazing,” Amy Siewe said from her Ford F-150 pickup truck. “I hate that we have to kill them.”
Over the past decade, Florida has held six state-sponsored competitions to raise awareness and reward hunters who humanely capture and kill the most Burmese pythons, the scourge of the Everglades. The annual competitions are held for 10 days in August. No firearms are allowed, only air guns and captive bolt guns.
This year’s Python Challenge attracted 1,035 hunters and captured 209 pythons. The winner caught 20 snakes and received 10 thousand dollars; Siewe won a prize for catching a python that measured about 3.25 meters.
State agencies pay about 100 contractors to hunt year-round, giving them access to dams that are closer to the man-made canals that run through the Everglades — closer to the snakes. Since 2000, more than 19,000 pythons have been removed in Florida, a little more than two-thirds by contracted “python removal agents.”
The program is not particularly lucrative, paying up to $18 an hour, plus $50 for every 12 inches up to 1.20 meters of snake and $25 for every 12 inches beyond that. Remove a python nest? 200 dollars.
That’s why inveterate hunters like Siewe, 46, have become full-time guides teaching newcomers how to find and kill Burmese pythons, which have been so successful in adapting to Florida that they appear to be there to stay. despite years of efforts to eliminate them.
Although the United States and state governments have spent billions of dollars to restore the Everglades, pythons have decimated endemic birds, rabbits and deer since they were documented as an established population in 2000.
The theory goes that they were imported from South Asia as exotic pets and many were released when they grew too large. They made their way into northern Florida, the U.S. Geological Survey found, threatening a larger portion of the ecosystem.
Scientists don’t know how many pythons live in the wild in Florida or how often they breed. Someday, new genetic techniques could help suppress the population. But for now there is hunting.
“It takes an average of 12 hours to catch a python,” Siewe said. But he added: “Every one we remove is saving the lives of hundreds of our native animals.”
Siewe started her guiding business in January with her fiancé, Dave Roberts. The couple often saw swamp rabbits on the way to her colony on the edge of the Everglades. Now they find pythons.
Siewe keeps python carcasses in a large freezer in his garage and skins them on the terrace of his condo. (Her neighbors know about her). On a rack in her living room hang dozens of skins, dyed in deep hues by a saddlery that helps her make python skin products, including Apple Watch straps.
In July, Siewe helped remove a 20-foot python from the torso of a college student who was hunting with his cousin.
One August night, Roberts drove along State Highway 29, with wetlands on both sides. Suddenly, Siewe screamed.
“Piton!”
It was a hatchling, about two feet long—so small that Siewe asked Roberts to look for a possible nest. “She just hatched,” he said. “It looks like he hasn’t eaten yet.”
People would see hatchlings and think, “Oh, well, this is not a very big snake,” Siewe said. “But it will be.”
But that didn’t make the next thing any easier.
“I mean, who doesn’t fall in love with this little guy?” Siewe asked, as she and Roberts pulled out a pellet gun they use to euthanize smaller snakes.
By: PATRICIA MAZZEI
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6987713, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-11-16 20:40:06
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