Saving the Everglades, one snake at a time

In case you don’t already have it marked on your calendar, it’s almost snake-hunting season.

Registration opened last week for the Florida Python Challenge, which begins Aug. 5. Hunters, both professional and amateur, are eligible to compete for a $10,000 prize in the 10-day event, which involves slogging through the Everglades and finding Burmese pythons to kill.

Anyone interested in competing must first register and take an online training that covers identifying the snakes and humane means of killing them. I’m a little vague on how you kill a python. Shoot it? Stab it? Wrap yourself around it and choke the life out of it?

Which brings up an even bigger question: Who in his or her right mind goes to Florida in August?

But if you have to be down there anyway, you might as well take a shot at it because it’s for a good cause. Burmese pythons pose a major threat to native wildlife in the Everglades. In fact, they shouldn’t even be in Florida in the first place, but, somehow, they slithered through border security. Maybe Florida needs to build a wall.

Burmese pythons have hearty appetites and eat just about anything, including birds, rabbits, white-tailed deer and opossums. (Personally, I think anything that gets rid of an opossum should be given a medal and a lifetime pass to Disney World, but that’s just my particular phobia.)

So, the Florida Python Challenge is “an important program that will help restore Florida’s ecosystem,” according to Donna Kalil, a python hunting professional. “To try to keep the Everglades healthy, you have to have the animals that belong in it. And in order to do that, you have to remove the invasive predator that is the Burmese python.”

As important as it is to me to keep the Everglades healthy, I’m going to pass on this opportunity to go python hunting, though.

It’s not that I have a fear of snakes; I’ve convinced myself they’re merely worms on steroids.

And I’ve survived dumber experiences in the quest to provide my readers with quality journalism. I’ve flown upside down in a stunt plane, gotten into the ring against a professional kick-boxer nicknamed Superfoot and wrestled a 750-pound Alaskan brown bear named Victor.

(Okay, the bear and I didn’t really wrestle. Before the match, his manager said Victor would only compete as hard as I did. So, I got into the ring and immediately took a dive. Which was a tactical mistake, because Victor immediately took a dive on top of me.)

But if I ever feel the need to save the Everglades, I think I’ll wait until they air condition it.