FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. — Go ahead, stretch out in the soft grass. It's comfortable. You're surrounded by a smorgasbord of prey. You may belong half a world away, but here in the Everglades, life is good.
Except you're a Burmese python, and the state wants to hunt you down and kill you. It hasn't put a bounty on your head, but it may as well have: If caught, you're decapitated.
In this moonlit world of marsh, bug and fanged danger, snake hunter Jeff Fobb is top predator.
He's one of seven snake experts licensed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to stalk the slithering python, whose intrusion into the Everglades upsets the ecosystem's delicate balance.
Of the six snakes captured since the three-month trial eradication program began July 17, Fobb and his team have accounted for four: three hatchlings found at once and a 6-footer snared Thursday night.
"The best thing that's going to come out of this is the collection of scientific information for the state," says Fobb, who as part of his license must weigh, measure and determine the sex of the snake, log in its GPS coordinates, kill it humanely and examine its stomach contents.
But first he has to find them.
Throughout the night Thursday, the snake hunters traversed Everglades access roads, shining headlamps into the roadside where pythons lurk to ambush prey.
Marinating in a mix of sweat and bug spray, Fobb and another reptile enthusiast, Michael Tisdale, trekked a 10-mile route under a hazy sky.
"I'm not looking at making money," says Fobb, 43, a longtime snake expert with the elite venom response unit of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue. "This is an excuse to go fool around in the Everglades."
The exotic snakes, which escaped or were released by owners, have been in the Everglades for years, competing for food with native species. They can grow 6 feet in a year, up to 20 feet and 200 pounds.
The trial program, in which certified snake experts are licensed to hunt pythons on state land from Lake Okeechobee south, is designed to thin the snakes' ranks and gather data.
Officials with Everglades National Park, where several private agents hunt pythons on federal land, say the snakes could number 5,000 to 140,000. "They have huge clutches, 40 to 100 eggs," park spokeswoman Linda Friar says.
On Thursday's hunt, Fobb, and Tisdale, 46, encounter minor marsh denizens: owls, yellow striped lubber grasshoppers and bufos, the largest of Florida's frogs and toads.
