EVERGLADES
using pythons to catch pythons.
Every two weeks, he flies over the area, picking up the unique signal of radio transmitters surgically implanted into 25 snakes and plugging their coordinates into a spreadsheet. The hope is that these so-called “Judas snakes” will lead them to others, especially breeding-age females.
This day, they’ve picked up the signal of Python No. 21 — a 50-pound, 11-and-a half-foot male named Johnny Rebel who has helped find 20 adult pythons, including eight females carrying approximately 560 developing eggs.
“He’s an MVP,” Bartoszek says with a grin. “Our most valuable python.”
Bartoszek straps on a machete and, with a nod to Sherlock Holmes — “The game is afoot!” — plunges into the woods. Following deer paths, he and field technician Ian Easterling step over old barbed-wire fences and downed melaleuca trees as the receiver leads them deeper into the brush. The beeping intensifies.
“We’re getting warmer,” Bartoszek says. “This looks snaky right here. This is where I would be.“
“I see a head here!” Bartoszek shouts a few moments later. “Confirm!“
“There’s a snake moving here,” Easterling replies. Diving into the undergrowth, Bartoszek does a double-take: “Hold on a second. There might be two pythons!”
Johnny, it seems, has found a girlfriend.
After catching their breath, he and Easterling plunge their heads into the thicket, where the fat reptile is coiled up — and staring right at Easterling. “Hi!” he says. “Don’t strike out!”
Easterling grabs the tail as Bartoszek clamps a hand around the snake just behind the head. She is shedding, making it difficult to establish a grip.
“Here comes the pretzel move,” he shouts as the giant reptile writhes, flopping against his thigh with a thud. With a deep groan, she lets go the contents of her digestive tract. The fight is over.
Back in the lab, they weigh and measure their prize: nearly 14 feet long and just over 95 pounds. After putting her in a case and locking her in a storeroom, Bartoszek sifts through her droppings, finding bits of bone and what turn out to be the hooves of a white-tail deer — the primary prey of the Florida panther, an endangered native species.
“It feels like ‘CSI Crime Scene’ here in this lab sometimes,” he says. “It’s the smoking gun, what’s going on out there in the Everglades.“
In the past six years, the conservancy team has removed more than 500 pythons with a combined weight of about 13,000 pounds from a 50-milesquare area. Despite that success, Bartoszek thinks that total eradication of the Burmese python “is off the table.”
“It seems to be adapting and evolving real time here in the Everglades ecosystem,” he says. “It may be more appropriate to start referring to them as the Everglades python. Because they’re ours now. They’re here.”
When the Everglades restoration plan was adopted in 2000, it aimed to turn back the clock to the pre-drainage wilderness of Douglas’ imagination. But in the face of rising seas, along with fluctuating temperatures and rainfall distribution, experts agree there is no going back.
“Everglades restoration has always been an ambitious and complex endeavor,” the National Academies of Sciences panel wrote. “Our current review emphasizes how it is also dynamic and the importance of focusing restoration on the future Everglades, rather than on the past Everglades.”
Earlier this year, an interagency group that includes the Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service issued its latest Everglades System Status Report — and it was not cheery.
“Overall, the Florida Everglades is struggling to survive in the face of sustained pressure from human activities and the increasing impacts of climate change,“the group wrote. “The poor to fair scores reflected in the report card indicate that the region’s ecosystems are degraded and the anticipated ecological benefits of restoration are still to be realized.“
Still, there are some hopeful signs.
Some adaptation is taking place. Scientists poking through the bellies of wood storks, an “indicator species” for Everglades restoration, have found evidence that they are feasting on the non-native African jewelfish. And the endangered Everglades snail kite is showing a fondness for an exotic species of the mollusk, another latecomer to the region.
Perhaps the most encouraging development of all is the ongoing $578 million project to restore 40 square miles of the Kissimmee River Basin. Since the demolition of some of the dams, a portion of the river has found its old channel. The wetlands are returning, and so is the wildlife.
Thomas Van Lent, vice president of science and education at the Everglades Foundation, recently took a pontoon boat trip on a 2-mile section of the restored river.
“And there were snail kites everywhere,” he says. “It’s just amazing to see the effects.”
His colleague Stephen Davis believes the plan can provide flood protection — and water for drinking and recreation — while restoring and preserving the Everglades’ original functions.
“I think there are some that think restoration is like restoring an old automobile back to what it looked like and felt like historically,” he says. “That’s not the case with Everglades restoration.”
In 2015, the Corps submitted its most recent report to Congress, estimating the total cost of restoration at $16 billion — about twice the original projection. Unsurprisingly, that figure draws detractors who question such a large outlay being spent with no guarantee of success.
One recent steamy morning, Michael Todd Tillman watched as three massive pumps, running around the clock since spring, spewed water into the L-29 Canal beside the Tamiami Trail at a rate of 250 cubic feet per second.
“They’re about to flood me out,” says the airboat operator, whose family has a recreational camp inside the park.
Tillman says he understands what the engineers are trying to do, but wonders whether he and others could be losing a way of life based on someone’s best guess.
“They made huge mistakes before,” he says. “How do they know this is the right answer now?”
Whatever the final price tag, Nuttle says humans created this “hybrid ecosystem” and that it is up to humans to maintain it — for nature’s sake, and for our own.
“We started in South Florida by declaring war on the ecosystem,” he says. “It’s not restoration that we’re paying for; it’s restitution.“