Christine Smith watches as each of her fellow trainees is presented with a successively larger Burmese python to chase down, capture and wrestle into a sack. The first person to volunteer got a roughly 5-foot-long snake, and the most recent person had a 9-footer. Smith would rather not go last and receive what’s likely to be the largest python, especially as she just learned that in Florida, the snakes can grow longer than 18 feet and weigh more than 100 pounds.
The petite state wildlife worker finally steps forward for her turn. She resolutely watches the trainer pour a fire-hose-thick, 10-foot-long python from a white sack onto the ground. “OK, Christine,” he says, stepping back. “It’s all you.”
It’s a sunny May afternoon at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission office in Naples, and Smith and seven others are participating in a Nature Conservancy training session on identifying and capturing dangerous non-native reptiles, like the python currently unspooling across the grass.
Smith, a former accountant, darts across the lawn in her khaki uniform, chasing the muscular snake as it slithers toward the cover of a patch of shrubs. As she had been instructed, Smith grabs the snake’s tail and pulls it back into the open. Before it makes another run, she pins the python to the ground using the soft rubber handle of a 3-foot-long aluminum snake hook and then grips the reptile right behind its head with her hand. When held in this way, pythons instinctively back deeper into the captor’s fist, where they are safely controlled. This one, however, is hissing and twisting in Smith’s grip, displaying its rows of needlelike teeth. . . .
http://magazine.nature.org/features/python-patrol.xml#sthash.dfnkneHE.dpuf
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