The 2022 Florida Python Challenge culled a total of 231 of the invasive snakes from South Florida.
Close to 1,000 participants from 32 states and as far away as Canada and Latvia fanned out across the southern tier of the peninsula over a 10-day period from Aug. 5 to 14 to poke and prod through swamps and grasslands in search of the snakes, which are well camouflaged and often hide in dense underbrush.
The winner of this year’s competition was 19-year-old Matthew Concepcion, of Palmetto Bay, who snatched 28 Burmese pythons from South Florida ecosystems, and bagged the $10,000 Ultimate Grand Prize, courtesy of the Bergeron Everglades Foundation.
Dustin “the Wildman” Crum of Ochopee, star of the Discovery Channel’s “Guardians of the Glades” show, won $1,500 for the longest python, at a length of 11 feet, 0.24 inches. It’s the second year in a row he’s won the largest snake. Last year’s snake was 15 feet, 9 inches.
Deadly impact
Burmese pythons, which are indigenous to southeast Asia, are thought to have slithered their way into the Everglades in the 1990s via the exotic pet trade. They’ve thrived, establishing breeding populations as far south as Key Largo and as far north at the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in western Palm Beach County. The largest ever recorded in Florida was 18 feet long.
They prey on deer, racoons, possums, alligators and other indigenous species, and possibly make it more difficult for endangered Florida panthers to find prey.
The U.S. Geological Survey says there are “tens of thousands” of the snakes holed up in Florida, with some estimates being as high as 300,000. Females can lay as many as 100 eggs per clutch. The state says that more than 17,000 of invasive animals have been removed from the wild since 2,000.
A method to the madness
Concepcion has been an outdoor fanatic since he was kid and his parents bought a house on a canal, where he learned to fish. He’s been python hunting for the past five years, and said it can take months to find your first snake, but once you do, the joy is like being a little kid in a candy shop.
“If I can’t go out and fish, then I’m out hunting [python] all night,” he said. “It’s a love-hate relationship. Sometimes you’re out there for like 15 hours and you don’t even see one snake. And the next night you go out for the first five minutes you see three back to back. It’s definitely a mental game.”
In his five years of hunting, he’s been bitten four or five times, he said. “You can’t just pull your hand out,” because the snake’s teeth are angled backward. “You have to let the snake lose interest in you, or put alcohol in its mouth to get them off.”
He said he’s seen python eating owls in the wee hours of the night, and nabbed his largest snake while scouting for the Python Challenge this year, just before sunrise on Loop Road in the Everglades. It measured 15 feet, 11 inches.
Concepcion said he typically hunts at night because that’s when the big snakes move, around 4 or 5 in the morning. He said they seek out the warmth of roads, where he spots them with his car lights.
This year’s Python Challenge was a little different, though. After only finding one snake on the roads of the Everglades, he shifted strategies. “I worked a levee, caught a couple hatchings, and was like, ‘Dang, this might be the ticket!’ So every single night from then on, I went out there — just before sundown to sunup.”
He walked the canal, probing the underbrush with a flashlight. The smaller snakes are so well camouflaged that Concepcion said he looks for their shadows cast by the flashlight beam, instead of the actual snakes. Larger snakes are easier to spot. “They will have a slightly purple tint to them. They’re really beautiful.”
How does being up all night for 10 days affect his day job of working on charter boats as a mate?
“Uft. I actually told my job I was going to have to take a break and pursue this,” he says. “When hunting comes around, that’s what I have to do. Luckily he [my boss] was cool about it.”
As for the $10,000, Concepcion says he doesn’t want to touch it, but admits he’s considering buying a powerful lighting setup for his truck, which will help him spot more snakes.
