COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. – Mike Elfenbein said he was on his way to dinner with his son when the two stumbled upon a group of guys trying to wrangle a python in Big Cypress National Preserve.
“They had one guy pulling on the snake and two guys watching and that didn’t really work out so good,” Elfenbein said.
So, he and his son stepped in to help, not realizing the python would be able to put up such a fight, especially when it was so outnumbered.
“The five of us on top of this thing and it literally lifted us off the ground, like off the ground,” he said.
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Elfenbein said the more-than 17-foot-long snake was a fighter.
“We literally put all of our weight on the snake. We sat on it and the snake pushed back and lifted us off the ground to the point where we had to rebalance ourselves and regain control,” he said.
Once they overpowered the snake, they were in for another surprise.
At 198 pounds, the invasive species was declared the second-heaviest python ever caught in Florida.
When the snake was opened up, it was clear this thing had quite the appetite.
Inside, Elfenbein said there were bone shards from a deer and 29 pounds of fat, proving the python wasn’t necessarily eating because it was hungry, but because as the apex predator in the Everglades, it could.
According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, pythons eat a variety of mammals, birds and reptiles, even alligators.
Even with such a powerful snake lurking and well camouflaged in the woods, Elfenbein said the Everglades is one of his favorite places to be, but there are some things that scare him.
“I walk through these swamps in the dark to get to a tree stand in the morning before the sun comes up, to be able to watch the woods come to life, knowing that a snake that big can be standing next to me, and I’d never even know it, and how many times have I walked by that and they let me go by because I wasn’t the meal they wanted, and when is some little kid going to walk by there? How many more deer are going to walk by there?”
He also said he is scared to lose the Everglades to the growing number of pythons.
As the leader of a conservation group, he believes steps being taken by the federal government to preserve Florida’s natural habitats could backfire and lead to more pythons in the wild.
“147,000 acres of the Big Cypress National Preserve is being proposed currently by the National Parks Service for a wilderness designation which would forever in perpetuity limit not only the ability of the public to access these places but limit the ability of the state and federal land managers from properly executing their duties of managing the landscape,” he said. “So my fear is, that this problem that is already being addressed with maximum effort, yielding minimum results is now going to be forced by a federal rule to be managed with minimum effort.”
This comes as Elfenbein and FWC point out more pythons are being found in Central Florida.
“They are going up the east coast to Palm Beach. They are moving. It’s a wave. They run out of food and they just keep going,” he said.
The United States Geological Survey also says Python DNA has been discovered in a waterway in Osceola County.
To learn more about Mike’s big catch and what he plans to do with the python now, check out Florida’s Fourth Estate. You can download the podcast from wherever you listen to podcasts or watch anytime on News 6+.
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