Everglades python nesting season only opens up for a short window each year, and when it does, we hit it hard. The pythons are breeding, looking for high dry ground to lay their eggs, and if you know where to look, you can find them clustered up in ways you just don’t see the rest of the year. That’s what we were chasing on this first push out into the islands.
This season looked different from the start, and not in a good way. Otto, my lead dog and honestly one of the best python-hunting dogs I’ve ever seen, passed away at just under six years old during an iguana hunt. That dog knew exactly where to look, barely needed direction, and absolutely set the bar for what nesting season work is supposed to look like. His absence hits every time I walk these islands. My other lead, Trouble, was too far along with her own litter to hunt. So this year falls on the next generation: Uzi, Trigger, Blue, and their mother Rogue. Auto’s pups, all just turned one year old, and this is their first real nesting season.
I spent a lot of the early night manually checking mounds and old nest holes myself, with Uzi working alongside me. She’s been showing the most interest out of the group when it comes to locating nests, so I was walking her through it, getting her into the kinds of spots she needs to learn. Sawgrass heads are what pythons love. The grass weaves together tight enough to stay dry even in a downpour, and it gives the female a protected spot to coil around her eggs and regulate temperature. We found a few old holes, some soft-shell turtle eggs that river otters had already raided, and Blue turned up a big rat snake shed. No pythons yet, but the dogs were working.
Then the storm hit. We were out on aluminum boats, and lightning was stacking up on the radar fast. We had maybe twenty minutes before it was going to be on top of us. I pushed one more island, because of course I did, checked an old nest site from 2023, and then it opened up. We got soaked. Waited it out, got back on the water, and kept going.
That’s when Uzi locked up.
She started barking and working one specific clump of vegetation hard. Travis called it first: python. I could see shiny skin in my flashlight and dug in to find the head. She was buried in there, coiled up and dry as could be, even with rain pouring down all around her. The sawgrass was doing exactly what I said it does, keeping everything underneath bone dry.
She was a good-sized female, clearly gravid, full of eggs. Getting her out of that tangle took some work. I grabbed the tail, tried to trace her body through the knotted-up grass, and she was not cooperating. She slapped me pretty good before I got control of her.
Once we had her, I could see there were no eggs laid yet. She hadn’t nested, just found her spot. That meant we got her before the eggs even went in the ground.
While we were grinding through that first night, one of my guys, Tombo, was out with a group of clients from South Carolina and found a 16-footer on an active nest with 50 eggs underneath her. Biggest python that crew had ever seen. Biggest Tombo had ever caught in five years of working with me. They earned it.
Nesting season is just getting started. The dogs are learning, the crew is building, and the pythons are out there. We’ll be back.
