HOLEY LAND WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT AREA, Fla. (AP) — It’s after midnight when the windshield fogs up on Thomas Aycock’s F-250 pickup truck. He flashes a low smile as he slowly maneuvers through the sawgrass, down dirt roads deep in the Florida Everglades.
His windshield just confirmed it: When the dew point drops in the dead of the night, it’s prime time for pythons. “I catch more pythons when that happens,” Aycock explained. “It’ll make things start moving.
” Aycock, a contractor with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, has hunted Burmese pythons in the Everglades for 11 years. The retired U.S.
Army veteran divides his time between North Carolina, the Florida Panhandle and Homestead, Florida, where he keeps a recreational vehicle. He always participates in the , hosted by the wildlife commission to incentivize people to track down invasive Burmese pythons that thrive in Florida’s preserved wetlands. This year’s 10-day challenge ends at 5 p.
m. Sunday. The timing is intentional: Pythons typically hatch from their small, leathery eggs each August before wriggling away into the swamp.
Aycok loves snakes. He’s also passionate about preserving the Everglades and understands the “greater ecological issue with these pythons,” a prolific apex predator threatening Florida’s native snakes and mammals. These pythons are notoriously hard to spot in the wild and determining their numbers is difficult, but the United States Geological Survey cons.