ORLANDO, Fla. – Hunters from all over the world are in the Everglades right now, competing to bring in the most Burmese pythons before the Florida Python Challenge wraps up on July 19.
News 6’s Matt Austin drove four hours to Everglades City to find the people who do this on purpose. Turns out, they’re not who you’d expect.
“OK — I just got a text from the python hunter. She says the bugs are raging.”
That text came from Kaylen Glenn, a tenth-generation Floridian and semi-pro python hunter we met at a restaurant with a name that says it all: Wild Man’s Pizza, Pasta and Pythons.
“It’s nighttime. It’s time to party,” Glenn said, as the sun started to drop.
She’s not who you picture when you hear “snake hunter.” Neither are her friends. Jerry Miller, a park ranger, showed up to hunt an invasive apex predator wearing shorts, “I brought my grandma down here and we caught like an 8-footer.”
Here’s how the job actually works. At sunset, you climb into the back of a pickup truck wrapped in lights. Once the sun is down, the truck creeps along while everyone scans the edge of the road for a shimmer that doesn’t belong.
“We’re gonna get our spotlights, and we’re gonna be looking for the pythons,” Glenn explained. “Shine back with a very small hint of blue.”
We got a hit almost immediately. Snake spotted. Tourists driving by pulled over to see what all the fuss was about — including a couple visiting from Poland.
The road was packed with hunters that night, and the mosquitoes were just as committed to the hunt as we were. The noise out there — frogs, insects, night birds — sounds like a natural casino running nonstop across 1.5 million acres of wilderness.
That wilderness has quietly been emptied out. Pythons have eaten their way through most of the small mammals that used to call the Everglades home. “You used to see deer foraging. I haven’t seen probably three deer in the last few years,” Glenn told us. “Their population has been decimated.”
The stakes are real: $10,000 goes to whoever brings in the most snakes by the end of the competition. But on this particular night, luck wasn’t on anyone’s side. We searched from the truck. We searched on foot — wool socks turned out to be a terrible decision. We heard a splash in the water that turned out to be a gator, not a python. We spotted massive, stoic owls perched in the trees, plenty of other snakes, bullfrogs, and gators lurking in the dark.
Then, around 1 a.m., the rain turned relentless. Even with hundreds of thousands of pythons estimated to be living in the Everglades, by 2 a.m. we had to call it a night — without catching a single one.
The Florida Python Challenge runs through July 19. We’ll let you know who wins.