American Pie: There's A Python At The Bottom Of My Garden!
...The Everglades National Park, covering 2,357 sq. miles, established in 1947, is located in the southwestern area of the wilderness. It is the largest subtropical wilderness left in the continental U.S. Interstate highway 75, which runs from the Canadian border to Miami, Florida, crosses through the Everglades in a section popularly known as “Alligator Alley,” for good reason. If you get a puncture there, keep driving...
John Merchant hopes that an estimated 50,000 pythons will deter builders eager to drain the Everglades.
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Well, not quite, but in Florida’s Everglades, about an hour’s drive from where I live, there are reportedly some 50,000 of the critters, but then, who’s counting? Aside from a habitat for snakes and other wildlife, including deer, panthers, alligators and manatee, the Everglades is a many-faceted wilderness covering some 4000sq. miles.
Believed by many people to be a swamp, it is actually a very wide, shallow, slow-moving river, fed by Lake Okeechobee in the north and constrained by a limestone ridge until it empties out into the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay. Some areas around the fringe have been drained and farmed for cattle and for sugarcane.
The Everglades National Park, covering 2,357 sq. miles, established in 1947, is located in the southwestern area of the wilderness. It is the largest subtropical wilderness left in the continental U.S. Interstate highway 75, which runs from the Canadian border to Miami, Florida, crosses through the Everglades in a section popularly known as “Alligator Alley,” for good reason. If you get a puncture there, keep driving.
For the intrepid, the Everglades provides plenty of opportunities to study flora and fauna. One organization even conducts guided night walks through it so you can observe the nocturnal animals. You can also take airboat rides. The airboat is like a water sleigh driven by a large airplane propeller in the rear.
The region is also a source of spectacular scenes for the ardent photographer. One such enthusiast I met wades through the water, pulling a canoe behind him that carries his photographic equipment. When I asked if he wasn’t concerned about alligators and snakes, he said he was, but always carried a machete!
Hungry developers have had their acquisitive eyes on the Everglades for years. Drainage schemes have achieved nothing except to disrupt the wildlife ecology. One crazy plan involved spraying melaleuca tree seeds from the air in the belief that the trees would suck up the water. The melaleuca is an Australian native, and quickly spread throughout large areas of Florida, choking off the indigenous species. The water is still there.
Human habitation in the region dates back 15,000 years, though one has to wonder how they coped with the mosquitos. In those days there were two major Indian tribes, the Calusa and the Tequesta, who are thought to have come to America centuries before, via the land bridge from what is now Russia.
After coming into contact with the Spanish in the late 16th century, the tribes succumbed over the following two centuries to diseases for which they had no immunity, and became extinct.
The Seminole Indians, a tribe that survives to this day, resided in the Everglades region after being driven there by the U.S. military in the Seminole Wars of the 19th century.
Python are not native to the Everglades, or even to the US; some of them got to the Everglades because people with more money than sense purchased them as pets, and then set them free after they had eaten the family’s dog and cat. Others found a home there after being liberated from zoos and pet shops by successive hurricanes. Once there, it was like home from home – a plentiful supply of food, a salubrious climate, and an absence of predators. They went forth and multiplied.
There are some fifty species of snake that are native to Florida, six of which are venomous, but all are reclusive, and only pose a threat when startled. In the twenty years I have been visiting or living in Florida, I have seen only one snake. Python are not venomous; they constrict their prey, but intrusive they are.
It’s difficult to be unobtrusive when you’re anything up to thirty feet long and close to a foot in diameter. They eat their prey whole, and with a jaw that they can dislocate, consuming a wild pig involves just a few gulps. With a nice long nap, and stomach acid you could etch metal with, the pig is digested in a day or two, hoofs and all.
All in all, you have to hope that such an important geographical and ecological feature as the Everglades will be preserved forever, but with our expanding population and unplanned development, the chances are not good. Right now the Python are seen as dangerous pests, but perhaps they’ll redeem themselves by deterring the town builders.
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