THE SNAKE CHARMERS

Invasive Burmese pythons are squeezing the life out of Florida's vast Everglades. An unlikely sisterhood is taking them on

- Craig Pittman

For Beth Koehler and Peggy Van Gorder, this is how it works: Three days a week they run a dog-grooming salon in St. Petersburg, Florida. Then they close up shop and head to the swampy grasslands known as the Everglades for three nights of hunting Burmese pythons—powerful constrictors that squeeze the life out of their prey.

Each night of the hunt, they spend hours slowly rolling along gravel back roads searching for the elusive invasive reptiles. They switch on massive lights atop their Jeep, turning the night as bright as day. The humid air is filled with a subdued chorus of hoots and ribbits.

The younger, more athletic Van Gorder drives, never going more than about 10 kilometres per hour, while Koehler, the more focused of the two, stands with her head through the sunroof, looking for any sign of a snake.

The pair achieved some fame in 2019 when they bagged the 500th python to be caught by hunters working for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. They’re not doing it for the money; there’s hardly any profit in searching for the slithery invaders. The job pays $8.46 [₹710] an hour plus $50 [₹4,200] per snake, with another $25-[₹2000]-per-30-centimetre bonus for snakes longer than 1.2 metres. Some nights the pair comes up empty.

No, it’s not for the money. They’re doing it to save Florida’s wildlife.

The first Burmese python turned up on the outskirts of Everglades National Park in 1979. It measured 3.6 metres and had been flattened by a car. By the late 1990s, a National Park Service biologist named Ray ‘Skip’ Snow sounded the alarm about pythons taking over the Everglades. No one took his warnings seriously because he had no proof that pythons were mating in the wild. In 2003, he finally found hatchlings, incontrovertible evidence of breeding—only to be told by the people in charge that it was now too late to stop the snakes.