South Florida’s ‘Snake Dundee’ continues to pursue pythons in the Everglades

Tall, tan and tough, Ruben Ramirez has the burly build one would expect of a man who routinely wrestles with the notorious invader of the Everglades: the Burmese python. As he walks along a trail through the marsh, he scans the underbrush with his headlamp, searching for the mottled pattern of an elusive master of disguise.

“Muggy, huh?” he says.

Muggy is an understatement. The summer air is thick enough to slice through it with a machete, and it hums with mosquitoes. Any patch of open skin — sometimes even covered skin — is susceptible to their voracious appetite for blood.

A night chorus of frogs fills the swamp, which seems to extend endlessly in all directions. The only reminder of the sprawling metropolis of faraway Miami is a faint glow in the eastern sky.

The deep Everglades is Ramirez’s habitat, a beautiful but inhospitable place where he has honed the python-hunting skills that have made him a semi-celebrity on wildlife TV shows and in documentaries. He’s out there most every night, he says, working not to share it with the serpentine invaders he stalks.

“I’m just one man fighting a war I can’t win,” Ramirez says.

Last year, Ramirez and his partner, George Brana — members of a small group that Ramirez founded called the Florida Python Hunters — blew away the competition in a state-sponsored snake hunt. The contest, intended mainly to publicize the threat that the giant invasive constrictors pose to native wildlife, attracted more than 1,600 participants from Florida, 37 other states and Canada. Ramirez and Brana caught 18 snakes over 30 days, claiming $1,500 in winnings. The runner-up in his category caught five.

The spread of the invasive species across South Florida has been well documented. The number of pythons captured in the wild began multiplying in the 1990s. Nobody can say for sure how they first got into the Glades, but most experts blame releases by pet owners over the years, with a probable boost from Hurricane Andrew. A popular theory is that the monster 1992 storm damaged the homes of snake owners and breeders in South Miami-Dade, allowing pet pythons to escape into the wild.

Now, most experts and scientists believe that pythons are here to stay, estimating their population in the tens of thousands .

While the snakes have established themselves, it has come at an increasing cost to native mammals and other animals, the python’s prey. Virtually anything that walks, crawls or flies in the Everglades has been pulled from the stomachs of captured snakes, and several recent studies show that small mammals in particular, such as the marsh rabbit, have been in decline since the python’s arrival.

At the beginning of a hunt one night this month, Brana, Ramirez’s hunting partner, held up a baby alligator that chirped mournfully at being caught.

“A python would eat that in a second,” said Ramirez.

To his seasoned eye, the loss of native animals has been so profound that he now calls the Everglades a “desert” — the exact opposite habitat of what the swampy green landscape appears to be to outsiders.

“They’re eating their way through the Everglades,” Ramirez said.

A few months before the snake-hunting contest, which was sponsored by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Ramirez came across an enormous 17-footer while he was hunting alone. When he realized he couldn’t hold the beast on his own, he yelled for Brana, who immediately raced to his rescue.

The trust they share is evident as they hunt in the night. Though some media reports have dubbed him “Snake Dundee,” Ramirez points to Brana as the best “herper” he knows. Herpers, a phrase derived from herpetology, are reptile aficionados that pursue their scaly quarry in the wild.

“It ain’t gonna get away from him and if it did, ain’t nobody woulda caught it,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez and Brana both have day jobs. Brana drives a truck and Ramirez, owner of VOS Engineering, is a pipeline engineering and underground construction contractor. But their python passions have become an increasingly big part of their lives.

Ramirez and the Florida Python Hunters group have been featured in the New York Times and in National Geographic, and Ramirez has been the focus of documentaries and wildlife television shows.

“As long as I’m not associated with the Turtle Man I’m fine,” Ramirez said.

Turtle Man is a nearly toothless Kentuckian who wrestles snapping turtles out of rivers and ponds on an Animal Planet television series. The popularity of these shows has helped educate people on conservation and environmental issues, one of Ramirez’s goals as well. But he also would like to turn python hunting into a more lucrative enterprise.

Aside from the $1,500 they won in the state contest, and fees they charge to take the occasional film crew on a hunt, Brana and Ramirez receive no compensation for pythons they remove from the Everglades. Although they supply data to the FWC and to scientists, and hunt for four or five hours five nights a week, no state or federal agency is paying them to help control what many scientists consider a serious threat to Florida’s native ecology.

Without a regular bounty, Ramirez says, there is not enough incentive to really make a dent in the python’s population. On the other hand, the state contest showed how difficult it is to find pythons in the wild, with only 68 caught. He also acknowledges there is a risk that people would bring in pythons from other places and try to trade them for cash if a bounty was placed on the snakes.

A lot of people ask him why he continues to hunt the big snakes. There is no money and little hope — outside of a historic freeze that could be lethal to the cold-blooded tropical snakes — of ever eliminating the threat.

For him, he says, hunting reptiles was his first passion. When he was 5, he tried to catch a corn snake, which objected.

“It was love at first bite,” Ramirez said.

Since that day, Ramirez says, he has never stopped herping. Having two girls has only deepened his desire to fight for the preservation of South Florida’s ecosystem, knowing his children will never experience the same Everglades he did.

“They’re only going to be able to read about this in a book,” he said.

For instance, Ramirez says, tourists taking airboat tours in the Everglades now ask whether they will see a python, rather than the native alligator that once was the apex predator.

“They’ve already made the python into a mascot for the city,” Ramirez said.

Through long hours of herping, two of the sharpest snake-spotting eyes in South Florida fail to find any trace of a python — aside from two dead, headless ones that someone else has dispatched. But monotony is the norm — most nights, like this one, the live pythons elude them.

Even after hunting the snakes for several years, Brana and Ramirez say the experience of spotting and grappling with a python is a moment of high adrenaline — but the knowledge they will have to kill it is bittersweet.

“It’s like killing your dog that you’ve had for 10 years,” said Brana. “That’s what it’s like for us with pythons.”

Follow Janey Fugate on Twitter @janeyfugate

This story was originally published July 26, 2014 at 11:51 PM.