HOLEY LAND WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT AREA, Fla. — It’s past midnight when the windshield of Thomas Aycock’s F-250 pickup truck fogs up. He laughs softly as he slowly maneuvers through the sawgrass, along dirt roads deep in the Florida Everglades.
His windshield confirmed it: when the dew point drops at night, it’s peak season for pythons.
“I catch more pythons when that happens,” Aycock explained. “That’s when things start moving.”
Aycock, a contractor for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, has been hunting Burmese pythons in the Everglades for 11 years. The retired U.S. Army veteran divides his time between North Carolina, the Florida Panhandle and Homestead, Florida, where he keeps a recreational vehicle.
He always participates in the Python Challenge in Floridaorganized by the wildlife commission to encourage people to track down invasive Burmese pythons that are thriving in Florida’s protected wetlands. This year’s 10-day challenge ends at 5 p.m. on Sunday.
The timing is deliberate: pythons usually hatch from their small, leathery eggs in August, after which they burrow into the swamp.
Aycok loves snakes. He is also passionate about Everglades conservation and understands the “larger ecological problem with these pythons,” a prolific apex predator that threatens Florida’s native snakes and mammals.
These pythons are notoriously difficult to spot in the wild and their numbers are hard to gauge, but the United States Geological Survey conservatively estimates that there are tens of thousands dispersed from South Florida. With each female laying an average of 29-50 eggs, their impact has been devastating.
In a 2012 study, the USGS found that raccoon populations had declined by 99.3%, opossums by 98.9% and bobcats by 87.5% since the early 2000s. Scientists say controlling this voracious snake species is a critical goal.
More than 600 hunters took part in the challenge this year, hoping to surpass last year’s total of 209 pythons killed. grand prize winnerWhoever kills the most animals humanely will receive $10,000.
The competition aims to raise awareness and has succeeded in doing so, involving celebrities and inspiring reality TV shows.
But the need for python control is so much greater. Since 2017, Florida has paid about 100 contractors to pick them up all year round in a project by the wildlife agency and the South Florida Water Management District.
Through 2023, more than 18,000 pythons have been removed from the wild, about 11,000 of them by contractors like Aycock.
It’s a decent supplemental income: $13 an hour if you drive the back roads, or $18 an hour if you walk into the swamp. On top of that, contractors get paid per hose: $50 for the first four feet of hose, plus $25 for each additional foot.
“You’re not going to make a living doing this if you do this full-time. There’s no way you could do it,” Aycock said.
In Florida, hunters are prohibited from using firearms to kill pythons. Furthermore, they are not venomous, so catching them is a matter of practicality.
Aycock goes into the wetlands to check known breeding sites, grabbing them when he can. But most of the time he drives the lonely roads at night, shining a spotlight into the marshes for the sound of croaking frogs.
These bug-filled rides are like therapy sessions for Aycock. Sometimes he brings along other members of the Swamp Apes, a veterans’ therapy nonprofit he’s a member of that captures invasive snakes in the wild, clears overgrown trails and works on conservation.
The group’s founder, Tom Rahill, and two other Swamp Apes followed closely behind, while an Associated Press crew traveled with Aycock and another Swamp Ape member during this year’s challenge.
Rahill is also a contractor and says he knows the swamp so well he can smell a python’s signature musk and sense in its gut when night is ripe.
There is an art to catching a snake, these men say, and it varies from hunter to hunter. Some use a snake hook and then jump on them before bagging them. Rahill prefers to use his hands if the snake is docile enough.
“Instead of jumping on the snake, you just calmly go up to it and pick it up,” Rahill said. “Then you can stroke their belly, their belly scales, and you can just pick up a wild python and do this.”
But Burmese pythons, constrictors that have no natural predators and can swallow animals whole, are not always calm.
Aycock described the time he captured a 17-foot (5-meter) python: He and his wife had to dance around the snake before he could hold it down and control its head to keep the predator from lunging at them. Even then, a hunter needs a helper to keep the snake uncoiled until it calms down and can be double-bagged to keep it from escaping.
Once the snakes are captured, hunters have 24 hours to deliver them to the wildlife agency. It is illegal for anyone other than a licensed contractor to transport a live, invasive snake.
Aycock first takes them home to have them euthanized with a bolt gun, which proves the animal was “humanely killed.”
“That’s the part of the job that I really … hate,” Aycock said. “I hate having to kill snakes.”
That night, long after midnight, AP called it quits after Aycock came home empty-handed. An hour later, Rahill spotted a chick.
That’s the way it is with snake hunting. Aycock said he hasn’t found a snake for months. But on a lucky night, hunters get a burst of joy when they see the oily sheen of a Burmese python hiding in the tall grass.
“I think I get an adrenaline rush every time,” Aycock said. “When it comes to me, it’s a good day.”