Python hunting is not a thing created for reality television. In Florida, it’s a fight to restore ecological balance to the Everglades, an ecosystem unlike any other on Earth. For 40 years, Burmese pythons — originally escaped from reptile-breeding facilities or released into the swamps by overwhelmed pet owners — have wreaked havoc on the Florida Everglades. The pythons top every native predator from bobcats to alligators, threatening a delicate ecosystem and costing the state billions of dollars.
Please note: This article contains graphic details of controlled snake killing. We do not advocate the indiscriminate killing of reptiles.
Story by Hal Sundt | Photographs by Alica Vera
Mike Kimmel craned his neck to the sky and warned me he’d never caught a python on a full moon. It was around midnight, drizzling, and the spindly branches strewn beside the levee were wet and shiny. This made it more difficult than usual to spot Burmese pythons, whose shimmering scales are one of the few giveaways that something is out of place. Earlier in the evening, I’d mistaken a stick for a python.
“You think you’re seeing snakes now,” Kimmel chuckled, “wait ’til six or eight hours of fuckin’ staring at the ground — everything looks like a snake.”
For the last 40 years, invasive Burmese pythons have been breeding rapidly inside and around the Everglades ecosystem. They’ve devoured nearly all the rabbits, opossum, raccoons and bobcats, jeopardizing an ecosystem that has cost the state of Florida billions of dollars to revive. Full-grown alligators have even been discovered inside distended python bellies. They are an apex predator run amok.
In March 2017, the South Florida Water Management District’s Governing Board piloted the Python Elimination Program. For an hourly minimum wage, plus small cash bonuses for each snake captured ($50 for the first four feet; $25 for each additional foot), local hunters would be tasked with wrangling a python population estimated in the tens of thousands, one snake at a time. From 1,000 applications, the governing board selected just 25 experienced hunters, including Mike Kimmel. Kimmel had never hunted a python before, and he doubted the problem was anything more than a few well-publicized incidents of escaped pets.
“Where I’m from,” Kimmel told me, “everyone thought the python thing was bullshit, was a hoax kinda.” Based on previous efforts, the Python Elimination Program was estimated to catch just 20 snakes in its first three months. In fact, they caught 158. “In the first year I rescued three alligators from pythons,” Kimmel said. “So I realized that’s their main food source right now. They’ve eaten everything else up, they’re eating all alligators essentially.”
Mike Kimmel never hunted pythons before applying to work for the Python Elimination Program in 2017. Now he’s caught 174.
Depending on where you live, hunting Burmese pythons, which can grow longer than 20 feet and weigh more than 200 pounds, can either sound otherworldly and gruesome, or old hat, akin to hunting deer in Minnesota, where I grew up. My friends cringed when I told them I was going python hunting, yet the clerk at my hotel in South Florida didn’t flinch. Still, the unique success of the Python Elimination Program caught my interest because, at a glance, the plan sounds downright Sisyphean. How could 25 people possibly make a difference against tens of thousands of snakes? So far, the program has removed 2,794 pythons — some longer than 17 feet — far more than any other program of its kind. As of mid-February, Kimmel has caught 174 pythons. Locals call him the Python Cowboy.
The oft-cited cause for the python infestation is Hurricane Andrew, which battered South Florida in August 1992 and destroyed a reptile breeding facility not far from Everglades National Park. But the catalyst for the outbreak occurred in the late ’70s, when overwhelmed exotic pet owners released their snakes into the park, sort of like flushing an unwanted fish down the toilet. In this way, the invasive python problem is emblematic of humanity at its worst in relation to the natural world — greedy, impatient, and shortsighted. However, the Python Elimination Program may serve as a rare story for our redemption. While human callousness created the problem, our resourcefulness could very well abate it.
Mike Kimmel catches his pythons by hand because he makes more than half his money off their skins. What’s more, hacking away with a machete would be grisly and inhumane.
On the evening of our hunt, Kimmel told me he would catch all his pythons by hand because he makes more than half his money off their skins. What’s more, hacking away with a machete would be grisly and inhumane. Snakes have a slow metabolism, so even if their head is severed, the rest of the internal organs keep working for some time. This is why it’s important to pith a snake’s brain before cutting off its head — if you don’t, the snake’s head can feel pain for upwards of an hour.
“One might think that suffering of this kind could not be endured for long,” Clifford Warwick discusses in his book Reptiles: Misunderstood, Mistreated and Mass-Marketed, “If only that were true ... If reptiles are to be killed by physical means (rather than by, say, an injected overdose of an anesthetic), then it has to involve complete and rapid destruction of the brain; otherwise they are very likely to suffer enormously and for a long time before dying.”
Kimmel had a 12-gauge shotgun in the back of his truck, but didn’t intend to use that either.
“Their kill spot is smaller than a dime,” he said, “and even if you blow their head clean off they will still swim out in the swamp and you won’t find them.”
When Kimmel was just a boy, his father quit his job as an accountant, sold the family’s belongings, and bought a 30-foot catamaran, which they sailed from Florida’s Treasure Coast down to South America. Lightning struck their boat, and they had to fend off pirates on the open sea, but Kimmel told me the journey was part of an ideal childhood. After a few years, the Kimmels returned to Martin County, and when Mike was 15, he began assisting the Florida Wildlife Commission with nuisance alligator removal. Only about 5-feet-6-inches and 125 pounds at the time, it was Kimmel’s job to hop on the gator’s back and duct-tape its jaws shut.
Now 31, Kimmel runs his own trapping business in Martin County. He has the lean, un-sculpted physique of someone who rarely goes to the gym but spends a lot of time on his feet. Python hunting is largely a nocturnal endeavor, so Kimmel usually doesn’t eat his first meal of the day until around 7 p.m., and then, he says, it’s “basically sweets all night.” He likes to drink Ting, a Caribbean grapefruit soda, but because it’s so expensive he usually settles for a couple cans of Squirt.
Recently, he’s gotten interested in television production. He assisted behind the scenes of the Discovery Channel’s six-part series, “Guardians of the Glades,” which stars another program hunter, Dusty “The Wildman” Crum, who hunts pythons barefoot (in the final episode Kimmel helps Crum catch a 16-footer). Soon after we met, Kimmel stopped calling me by name and began referring to me simply as “Professor.”
Like any formidable opponent, Kimmel speaks of the Burmese python with reverence. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine an organism more perfectly suited to destroy the Everglades. A 15-foot python could be at your feet and go unnoticed, they camouflage so well in the grass.
“They’re already a super snake,” Kimmel told me. “They already are more immune to diseases and viruses and parasites. They already breed more often, they already grow faster, they already eat more often, they can already adapt more easily, and this is all because they come from the reptile trade so they have these different qualities.”
Close up of a Burmese python, courtesy of the Florida Fish & Wildlife, photo by Kevin Enge. Considered a “super-snake” the Burmese python is a perfect threat to the delicate balance of the Everglades because of its immunity, breeding success and camouflage and diet.
To illustrate the python’s resilience, Kimmel recalled an instance when he’d captured a couple of 13-footers, pithed their brains, cut their heads off and threw them in a cooler in his truck-bed. A few hours later, stopped at a red light on US 1 near Miami, he noticed people in the lanes around him taking photos and videos, pointing animatedly at the back of his truck; both headless snakes had pushed the cooler top open and were hanging off the sides, smearing blood all over his white F-250.
Another time, Kimmel took out a production crew from a cooking show that was filming a segment on eating pythons. When it came time to prepare a recently caught python for a meal, the headless snake began to move on the table and wrapped around Kimmel; the fight lasted an hour.
I asked Kimmel how python meat tastes.
“Just really, really chewy. Too chewy.” He paused for a beat, then added, “Iguana’s much better. Iguana’s delicious.”
“As soon as Americans began to see the Everglades,” Michael Grunwald writes in his 2006 book “The Swamp,” “they began to fantasize about getting rid of its surplus water.”
Ambitious real estate developers looked upon the Everglades not as a diverse ecosystem worth preserving, but as a wet prairie to be drained, leveled and rebuilt. Repeated and largely failed attempts at reshaping the landscape caused devastating damage. In 1947, the same year Everglades National Park opened, Marjory Stoneman Douglas declared in her iconic work, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” that the Everglades was in its “eleventh hour.” She urged for a cessation of humankind’s meddling with this natural wonder and appealed to our potential for compromise:
There is a balance in man also, one which has set against his greed and his inertia and his foolishness; his courage, his will, his ability slowly and painfully to learn, and to work together. Perhaps even in this last hour, in a new relation of usefulness and beauty, the vast, magnificent, subtle and unique region of the Everglades may not be utterly lost.
The Burmese python problem didn’t exist when Douglas’s book was published, and pythons receive only a passing mention from Grunwald, but a 2012 study deemed Burmese pythons largely responsible for a “99.3% decrease in the frequency of raccoon observations, decreases of 98.9% and 87.5% for opossum and bobcat observations, respectively, and [a failure] to detect rabbits.” According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Florida houses more non-native reptile and amphibian species than any other place on the planet, and the United States Geological Survey estimates that invasive species in the U.S. result in upwards of $100 billion a year in damages.
Kimmel makes certain that he properly identifies the invasive species that he hunts. “Burmese pythons have a very distinct pattern that almost resembles a giraffe, but much more beautiful.”
In January 2017, after a video of a python attacking an alligator went viral, the South Florida Water Management District became determined to help with the problem. The result was the Python Elimination Program, and it’s the brainchild of Mike Kirkland, a 44-year-old man from Maryland who came to Florida specifically to study the Everglades. Before the python program, Kirkland’s responsibilities centered on invasive vegetation.
“Being the ‘snake person’ of the group,” Kirkland told me via email, “I was asked to develop and implement a three-month pilot study. … Though others thought this idea was less than sound, I considered it a dream come true. I’ve been catching snakes (to admire briefly and then set free — Steve Irwin-style) all my life.”
By his own account, Kirkland only sleeps about five hours every other night, and he makes himself available all day, every day to his python hunters. Every hunter can be tracked through a GPS app in real time, and Kirkland requires that he be notified whenever a python is caught, no matter the time of day. “Though I have not had much sleep in two years,” he said, “my methods seem to be effective.”
Mike Kirkland
The SFWMD is the largest landowner in South Florida. Later this year the Python Elimination Program will be authorized to hunt within Everglades National Park, but for now the project spans five counties around the park and the surrounding levees. Fortunately, pythons like to gather near the levees, especially at night when they are hunting. In the last year, the program's annual operating budget increased to $1 million dollars, but in its early years it hovered around $225,000. The higher budget will help Kirkland hire more agents and incentivize hunters to survey underexplored areas off the levees. Even with the pre-2020 budget constraints, Kirkland’s program has been remarkably prolific. Still, whenever we spoke, Kirkland always emphasized he didn’t see his program as superior to others.“It’s not all about body counts,” he told me during a later phone conversation, “it’s about understanding the behavior of these things.”
In truth, it’s difficult to measure the exact effectiveness of any given program.
“Because of the cryptic nature of this species, coupled with the vastness and relative inaccessibility of the Everglades,” Kirkland explained, “we cannot perform a conventional population estimate on pythons in Florida.” Further, the USGS estimates that Burmese pythons now spread across 1,000 square miles in south Florida, so it’s unlikely they could ever be eradicated. But Kirkland believes managing the population is within reason, and considering pythons’ voracious diets and the breeding capacity of just a single female python, he estimates his program has given more than 450,000 native animals a “fighting chance” — and removed tens of thousands of future pythons.
If there is hope for the long-term viability of something as seemingly barbaric as the Python Elimination Program, perhaps it can be found on Macquarie Island, about 900 miles off the coast of Antarctica. In 1810, feral cats and rabbits arrived aboard the ships of sailors who were hunting the island’s seal and penguin populations. The cats, which likely had been brought for company and to manage stowaway rats, roamed free, feasting on the island’s seabirds. By the 1980s, feral cats were estimated to be killing off more than 60,000 seabirds per year. The rabbits, who’d come along as a food source for the cats, destroyed the island’s foliage. The rats, meanwhile, ate everything.
But today, no cats, rabbits, rats or mice live on Macquarie Island, thanks to a unified effort by the Australian and Tasmanian governments (which together invested $17 million USD) and the Island Conservation, an organization dedicated to preventing animal extinctions on remote islands by eradicating invasive species.
The methods employed on Macquarie weren’t so different from the Python Elimination Program’s — after baiting the island, individual hunters did the grunt work of scouring its surface until no rodents could be found. The whole process took seven years. It’s not a perfect comparison: Macquarie Island is just 50 square miles, and nearly devoid of people. It may be more feasible for South Florida to adopt a similar timeline as New Zealand, which has set the goal of removing all rats from its 103,483 square miles by 2050.
Kimmel and I took turns standing on the running boards of his truck to gain a better view of the deep ditches straddling the levee. Kimmel had affixed high-beam lights above the truck’s doors, which illuminated the sawgrass and occasionally bounced off the glowing eyes of alligators fishing in the swampland. A heavy rotation of country music blared from Kimmel’s speakers, but whenever we stepped out of the truck, all I could hear was the full-throated croaking of frogs.
Around 2 a.m., Kimmel thought he saw a snake in the grass, but figured it was just a wet stick. The truck rolled another 20 feet, and then Kimmel threw it in reverse. Since we were on our way out, he determined it was worth another look.
“Yep,” he said calmly. “That’s a python.” Kimmel is careful not to kill just any snake that moves. He spots pythons by their size - typically much longer and thicker than other snakes - and the pattern of scales. “Burmese pythons have a very distinct pattern that almost resembles that of a giraffe,” Kimmel explained, “but much more beautiful.”
Kimmel hopped out the truck, grabbed a portable tripod and set up his phone to record the capture for his Instagram followers - he had 25,000 that night, and as of publication it's up to 52,000. He stepped slowly into the tall grass and then snatched the python by the tail. He pulled it onto the levee and admired it for a moment. “It’s not that big, it’s actually fat for its size,” Kimmel said as the nearly 8-foot ($200) python hissed and tried slithering away. He began a sort of dance, dangling the snake by the tail, avoiding its sudden lunges and waiting for it to fatigue.
Kimmel often records and shares videos of his hunts with his growing community of followers on Instagram.
Kimmel’s main objective now was to prevent the constrictor from getting too close to his torso. Pythons are nonvenomous, but they have lethal constricting power. He once had a 15-footer wrapped tight around his waist, and had someone not been there to help, it could have turned grisly.
“The only thing I could have done is let go of its head to try to go for my knife,” Kimmel said, “but at that point all bets are off; I let go of its head, and that fucker’s going to come right for my throat.”
When Kimmel deemed the python sufficiently tuckered out, he snatched its neck and secured it into a small sack, which he then put in a compartment in the back of his truck. Kimmel typically waits to kill his catches until his hunting expeditions are over, at which point he piths their brains with a spike attached to the backside of a tomahawk that he later uses to cut their heads off. Kimmel tries to do minimal damage to the skulls, which he sells as keychains and taxidermy displays on his website.
At 2:15 a.m. Kimmel texted Mike Kirkland to alert him of the catch. Moments later, Kimmel's phone dinged.
“Look, he’s up,” Kimmel said. Then he smiled as he read Kirkland’s response aloud: “Awesome, 2,106.” The pythons-caught count had just grown by one.
About a month after our hunt, Kimmel discovered a single piglet in the hog pen at his home. Like Burmese pythons, hogs are invasive to south Florida, and Kimmel is hired to hunt them. When fully grown and riled up, their tusks can fatally wound.
“It literally will open you up like a zipper,” Kimmel told me.
Worried the piglet might get trampled by the other hogs, Kimmel considered removing it from the pen, but he didn’t want to separate it too soon from its mother, a three-legged hog named “Snakebite” that Kimmel had rescued some years back from a water moccasin. After a few days, though, Kimmel noticed the piglet struggling. He placed it on the grass and began palpating its chest softly, suspecting that it had been crushed in the night. In a video he later posted on Instagram, Kimmel can be heard saying, “Come on buddy, you’re a fighter,” as he presses on the baby hog’s chest. Then he begins giving the piglet mouth-to-mouth, wiping hog snot from his upper lip when he’s finished.
“C’mon buddy, c’mon,” he repeats.
After almost 40 minutes, Kimmel pronounces the hog dead, likely from a collapsed lung.
Kimmel sees his work as necessary to protect a threatened ecosystem, but he admits, “I hate that part of my job where I’ve gotta kill stuff.”
Had the hog been born in the swamplands and grown to full size, it just as easily could’ve been another invader Kimmel is paid to kill. But Kimmel had planned to let this one live the rest of its days on his ranch, grazing and rolling in the mud and thriving under his care, not unlike the 15 pet snakes he also keeps at his home. Kimmel actually operates a snake and reptile rescue at his house where pet owners can drop off their animals, no questions asked. His Instagram videos occasionally showcase clips of constrictors stretching out in his yard, like sunbathers on a hot summer day. When we were out on the levee Kimmel mentioned that he’d always liked snakes growing up, and it pained him to hunt something he also genuinely admired.
“I hate the part of my job where I’ve gotta kill stuff,” he said.
When I finished watching Kimmel’s attempt to resuscitate the piglet, I gave him a call. He answered the phone with a bellowing, “Professor!” and told me his hunting had been going well: He’d recently caught a 16.5-footer and was averaging about two pythons a night.
I pressed him on why he exerted so much effort to save the piglet, the offspring of an invasive species he normally exterminates. Kimmel first justified the hogs’ presence at his ranch by saying he keeps them for livestock.
“But mainly,” he added, “whether it’s invasive or not, and whether I hunt it or not, every life is valuable.”
After the piglet’s death, Kimmel acknowledged he was both saddened and frustrated that he hadn't trusted his gut and removed the baby from the pen sooner. Now, a few days later, he sounded chipper. When I asked him how he was holding up, he said, “Death is a very regular thing in my operation.”
Hal Sundt is a writer from Minnesota. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The Ringer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Eater, and elsewhere. He is grateful to have received a grant-in-aid from Oberlin College, which helped cover his expenses for this story.
