Editor’s note: Bill Kearney, who covers the environment for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, headed out to the Everglades, where he experienced a python hunt … of the canine kind.
I’m on my hands and knees in the darkness, pushing through a thicket in the Everglades, when I hear in the distance the noise I’ve been waiting for: Otto’s bark. According to his owner, Mike Kimmel, aka the Python Cowboy, it means, “Get over here ASAP! I got me a python!”
I obey, shouldering my way through sharp bushes until I find a path. Kimmel has already made his way to the scene. “Decent snake!” he yells.
I still can’t see the python, but Otto is yipping, darting and pointing to something under a carpet of ferns.
“Get over here, y’all,” Kimmel yells to his clients, brother and sister Marshall Willey and Macee Cahill. They’ve hired Kimmel and Otto to add some adventure to their lives — though they’ve hunted deer and hogs back home in east Texas, they’ve never seen, let alone grabbed an invasive Burmese python.
To help ensure they get a shot at a snake, Kimmel relies on Otto, a 5-year-old German wirehaired pointer. Otto just might be the best — if not the handsomest — python hunter in the world. And he comes with a very unique skill set.
Beyond roads
We’d rendezvoused a few hours earlier at the boat ramp at Everglades Holiday Park, where the Everglades abuts Broward County’s western suburbs. As the sun sets, Kimmel, lanky and mellow, and sunburnt from his day job as a contracted iguana hunter, preps his hunting boat.
Otto comes over to say hello. He’s got distinctive eyebrows, inquisitive brown eyes and a regal beard. Pet him and you feel no fat, just wiry hair, muscle, and a surprisingly solid head. “People are so used to fat dogs, they see an athletic dog with some ribs showing they think they’re malnourished,” says Kimmel.
With that he and his assistant, Jarrod Buzbee, invite Willey, Cahill and me aboard and we head out along a canal system that penetrates deep into Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area, part of the larger Everglades ecosystem.
As we speed farther away from civilization, Kimmel sets a soundtrack of country music. Bugs flash through the spotlight like a snow flurry. Otto stops by for a back rub.
Kimmel explains that most python hunting in Florida is done by road cruising, which entails driving for hours along back roads at night with powerful spotlights to find nearly invisible snakes. It can be thrilling, but is maddeningly inefficient — the Everglades is nearly void of roads. It also relies on flawed human eyesight, not the profound smelling abilities and prey drive of a good hunting dog.
Kimmel’s boat, and Otto, allow him to go beyond roads and find snakes where no one else is looking. He travels deep into roadless areas via the canal system and hops out on limestone spoil islands that were created when crews dug the canals decades ago. It’s prime invasive python habitat.
He then lets Otto loose, where his personality and talents take over. The talent is in his nose. The personality means prey drive, a need for teamwork, and a certain open mindedness — Kimmel says few dogs are willing to target pythons. If Otto smells a snake, he’ll point. And if he sees one, he’ll bark. Then Kimmel or the clients catch the python and remove it from the ecosystem.
Burmese pythons were brought to Florida via the exotic pet trade in the 1970s and ’80s. Sometimes they escaped. Sometimes they were dumped. A large number — it’s unclear how many — slithered into the South Florida wilderness when a breeding facility in Homestead was damaged during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Since then they’ve flourished to deadly effect. In some areas of the Everglades, mammal sightings have dropped by 98% since the snakes arrived.
And there’s no way to stop the invasion, which is moving northward, and has reached the suburbs of Fort Myers. Wildlife officials do hope to slow it, however, with paid contract hunters and with events such as the Python Challenge.
“To me it’s a lot more effective for what we’re trying to get done if I’m out here where the pythons are eating our native wildlife, where they’re reproducing, where they’re laying nests, rather than just along the road,” says Kimmel.
In other words, he’s reaching pythons that few other hunters can access.
“We’re finding the pythons that are hard to find, and finding the nests, and finding the breeding balls. We’re finding the pythons where they’re actively hunting the native wildlife, in their habitat.”
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‘I got bit’
Kimmel beaches the boat on a spoil island and Buzbee ties it to a tree. Otto’s runs to the bow, his stub rapidly ticking. “He knows what we’re about to go do,” says Kimmel.
He gives us instructions before we hop to the ground: “I would advise you to spread out. Let’s cover as much ground as we can. Take your time. Watch where you’re steppin’. This is the time of year we start to see a lot of water moccasins, especially on these stormier weeks.”
“Generally pythons are just gonna lay there. They’re not gonna run when they see you. They’re gonna rely on their camouflage. If you see one just stop, yell out. Let everyone know what’s going on. We’ll do our best to get to you. Keep your eye on it. If it starts to get away, dive on it, do whatever you can to stop it. Sound good?”
I’m not sure it sounds good, but we each walk our separate ways into the darkness. Every step through the waist-deep brush feels like a question — what’s there? What’s touching my face?
When road cruising, you still feel a physical connection to civilization — if need be, the road beneath you will lead you out somewhere, to Naples or the Turnpike. Out here, with dirt and ferns underfoot, frog noises near and far, and only a vague sense of Fort Lauderdale’s light pollution to the east, you’re basically walking through the blackness of a jungle at night.
Otto isn’t walking — he rampages through the undergrowth, nose to the ground, with one thing in mind. This is his domain.
Otto works out in front of Kimmel, disappearing, bushwhacking and returning. He’s assessing what’s been there, and what might be hidden, invisible. Kimmel says he doesn’t bother with native snakes, such as the venomous cottonmouths. “He’s not real impressed with native snakes. … He’s not real interested in ’em.”
I hear something rustling in the tiny leaves. Snake? Seems like it, I tell Kimmel. “Dragonfly,” he says. I cautiously peer down with my headlamp and find out he’s right.
Kimmel was born and raised in Martin County, but grew up, in part, on a sailboat. When he was 8, he and his family sailed from Florida to South America and up through the Caribbean. They were homeschooled on the boat and returned to Florida when he was a teen.
He “got into reptiles a bunch” and eventually became a contracted python hunter with the state for five or six years. But he switched to guiding and selling python leather products. “That allows me a lot more freedom to use my dogs,” he says.
Later, Kimmel calls out in the distance. Otto’s pointing on a hatchling python. As I rush over I ruin a perfectly good spiderweb with my face.
By the time I get there, Macee Cahill’s reaching into a low tree to grab it. As she does, the snake wrangles around and bites her.
“Oh, that’s a bite,” she says with admirable nonchalance.
Kimmel bags the snake and everyone praises both Otto and Cahill. But we’re after bigger prey.
Onward
We hop back in the boat and head farther into the Everglades. Now we all know the drill, and it takes about 15 minutes to comb through the underbrush of each island.
The third island feels a little different. There is a meadow, then a forested area carpeted with knee-high ferns. As I trail Kimmel and Otto he tells me he first hatched the idea of using German wirehaired pointers while watching his wife, who’s a professional bird hunting guide, work with the breed in the field. He was impressed by their grit and versatility, and wanted a dog that could handle the rigors of an iguana hunt.
He started taking Otto on golf-course, iguana-removal jobs when he was about six months old. Iguana skin is like leather and the spikes on their spine are hard and sharp. “For iguanas, it’s pretty much the same as birds,” says Kimmel. “It’s retrieving.”
“The only difference with the iguanas is we want a grittier dog like the wire-haired, because these iguanas, they fight back. They gotta be really athletic dogs, they can’t be scared.”
Jeff Jalbert, of Top Shelf Kennels in North Dakota, has hunted upland birds with German shorthaired pointers since 1989, and is now a breeder and judge that puts dogs through field trials that test hunting skills. He thinks it’s outstanding that Kimmel is using Otto on iguanas and pythons.
“The dog was bred to do anything,” said Jalbert. He explained that wealthy folks in Germany in the 1800s had a separate dog for each task — pointing, retrieving, blood tracking. “But the German wirehaired pointer is truly the poor man’s dog, where one guy could only feed one dog, and needed him to do everything, whether that’s go grab a duck out of the pond or protect the family from strangers.”
“I love the breed because they’re extremely hardy,” he said. “They’re in my opinion the most versatile breed. I live up in the tundra here of North Dakota, and we hunt in extreme conditions. It could be 10, 15, 20 below zero, and we’re still pheasant hunting, and our dogs will get out and thrive in that environment, and you go down to Florida and you see Otto, and it’s 100 degrees, and he’s out chasing lizards around,” he says.
A dog vigorous enough to do all that is not a layabout, he warns. “They’re not a dog that does well left idle. They’re physical specimens. You need to keep them exercised, you need to keep their body and their mind busy, they just thrive on having work to do.”
Before Otto, Kimmel, who also has a team of hog hunting dogs, experimented with using other breeds for pythons.
“They just didn’t want anything to do with the snakes,” says Kimmel. Even his best hog hunting dog, Moose, wasn’t a fit. “He showed me he kinda didn’t like it too much,” says Kimmel. “You can tell by his body language — not moving quick enough, going back to the boat, instead hunting the other side of the island, just little things like that. When you know your dog good enough, I mean, he literally speaks to you.” Based on tonight, Otto’s body language says, “Let’s go.”
There’s a lot of debate as to when humans domesticated dogs. Some researchers say 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. As for teaming up to hunt, rock art in what is now Jordan suggests dogs helped people corral gazelles into traps some 14,000 years ago. The synergy makes sense. Both species evolved as social predators who needed teamwork to survive. As Kimmel and Otto move through the underbrush of the Everglades, they both want the same thing, and use different skills to help each other.
This past spring was Otto’s first python nesting season. Kimmel says he found just over 20 nests. Average clutches are between 20 and 60 eggs, so if the numbers are accurate, Otto eliminated between 400 and 1,200 potential pythons from South Florida wilderness this spring.
“That alone shows how important the dogs are,” says Kimmel.
The most bountiful nest that Otto and Kimmel found this year was in a wildlife management area just west of Broward County. It had a nearly 17-foot mamma sitting on top of it with 76 eggs.
Kimmel and I split up to comb the island. Spider eyes shine like drew drops in the meadow. I see Buzbee’s, Willey’s and Cahill’s flashlights roaming beyond a thicket. I’ll have to crawl through on hands and knees to reach them. It’s then that I hear Otto go crazy.
We all race to him. As mentioned, Kimmel beats me to the snake. All I can see is the carpet of ferns, and Otto contemplating taking a nip. The ferns are disconcerting, a veil with a world underneath.
Kimmel praises Otto, then pries the veil open and there it is, thick as a slab of bologna, slowly moving away.
Willey and Cahill arrive and know it’s a bigger snake.
“I woulda had a tough time finding this thing without him, y’all,” says Kimmel.
Willey eases in and grabs the snake’s tail and raises it up, but where’s the head? After a few frantic moments of not knowing where a strike could come from, he spots it and grabs it without hesitation.
“There ya go!” yells Kimmel. Willey hoists the snake into the air. “If you don’t have a dog, hunting out here is tough,” says Kimmel. After pictures and high-fives, and more praise for both Otto and Willey, we bag the snake and board the boat. Otto’s tail is still ticking away.
It’s 1 a.m. We call it a night and head to the dock. Otto procures a head rub from Cahill on the way in. “He’s awesome,” she says. “You can tell he loves his job.”
“When it comes to using dogs in the woods — just like man has for thousands of years, truthfully — I love the hunt,” says Buzbee. “But it’s more of watching those animals do what they love doing. To be able to still come down here and do this with Otto in a spot that will never be touched, it’s a gift,” he says.
As we say our goodbyes at the dock, Otto runs across the parking lot and starts sniffing, looking for scents along the rim of wild grass. He’s not done. Kimmel calls him back and he’s at our sides in an instant, his stub tail still ticking fast and constant, as if releasing steam from some massive well of excitement, a well maybe older than Otto, older than the Everglades.
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.
Originally Published: