Python hunters to use shotguns
The roar of shotguns will sound in Everglades National Park as the war against the Burmese pythons that have devastated the park’s wildlife intensifies.
The park announced Thursday that for the first time it will allow state-contracted python hunters to pursue the giant snakes within park boundaries. And for the first time, it will allow the use of firearms — shotguns only — to kill them.
Although the park already uses more than two dozen of its own volunteers to catch pythons, the new initiative will triple the maximum number of snake hunters from 40 to 120.
The decision follows years of resistance by the national park, where hunting is prohibited. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission previously had been rebuffed in attempts to get stateauthorized python hunters to work within its boundaries.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we’ve realized that this is a significant problem that requires us to be open-minded and flexible in the way that we approach it,” said Pedro Ramos, superintendent of Everglades National Park.
U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, an enthusiastic hunter whose department includes the National Park Service, has pressed for more federal land to be opened up to hunting.
But Ramos said the new initiative to go after the pythons shouldn’t be considered a hunt, in the sense that hunters come onto other land to kill deer or ducks.
“It’s important to note that this is not a hunt that we’re introducing in Everglades National Park,” he said. “We’re inviting people that are interested in helping us tackle this problem come into the park and help us remove as many of these animals as we can out of the landscape.”
Natives of southern Asia, the pythons arrived in the Everglades from the exotic pet industry, escaping their enclosures or released by pet owners. Capable of killing a wide range of wildlife, they kill alligators, birds, deer and especially small mammals.
“The population of mammals, small mammals in particular, in Everglades National Park has essentially collapsed,” Ramos said. “We have not seen a marsh rabbit, for example, in years, and we attribute that to the presence of Burmese pythons in the park.”