Beagle pup is hot on the trail of pythons in the Everglades
By Neil Santaniello Staff Writer Posted
January 8 2005
He sits obediently in front of the government license plate of a white
pickup in Everglades National Park, tethered to the trailer hitch.
As a visitor approaches, the young beagle wags his tail with puppy
anticipation at the petting and ear scratching coming toward him.
"Awe, look at the beagle, look at the cutie," says Amy Ferriter, a
South Florida Water Management District senior environmental scientist.
Cute, clearly. But behind the wet nose and playful posture is a
7-month-old, 25-pound operative for park scientists. The beagle is in
training for a rather serious environmental mission: sniffing out an
expanding park population of Burmese pythons, nonnative snakes with
enough size and might to wrestle the native alligators.
"It's an experiment," explains the puppy's owner, Lori Oberhofer, a
park wildlife technician who uses a python-scented rag to train her
pet, purchased for $450 from a Missouri beagle breeder. "Hopefully
he'll never lay his jaws on a snake, just point them out."
The pup -- park biologist Skip Snow calls him a "detector dog" -- is
part of a stepped-up effort to rid the park of pythons, constrictors
that coil around Everglades prey as large as small mammals and wading
birds and grow to 18 to 20 feet in their native Southeast Asia.
The park's growing numbers of pythons, which Snow attributes to
snake owners casting off exotic pets, compete for food with native
Everglades animals, inhabit the burrows of threatened native indigo
snakes and appear to be gobbling down wading birds, Snow said. The
latter means they could eat endangered woodstorks, Snow said.
Snow and other park workers are searching out and killing pythons they
run across in the 1.5 million acre preserve. During roughly the past
two years, they have encountered nearly 100 of the giant snakes either
dead or alive, Snow said.
But python-breeding in that wet wilderness seems to be growing beyond
park borders, a problem now involving the South Florida Water
Management District.
The snakes, good tree climbers and swimmers, have been seen at the
extreme western edges of south Miami-Dade suburbia -- one was caught
trying to gulp down a backyard Muscovey duck. Others have intimidated
tree cutters north of the Miccosukee Tribe gaming complex at Krome
Avenue and the Tamiami Trail.
The water district grew alarmed after Miami Field Station employee
Robert Hill, who roams across the south-central Everglades repairing
water control equipment and gathering data, began routinely spying
pythons sunning on district canal banks on cold days, and after a
contractor mowing high grass on district property near Homestead ran
over five pythons in three hours, accidentally hacking them to death.
"They like that high ground on the edge of water, so our levees are
just perfect habitat [for them]," said water district vegetation
manager Dan Thayer. "I think they're going to colonize all of the
levees."
Well-acquainted with Everglades backcountry, Hill finds the species impressive. "It's an awesome snake," he said.
Awesome or not, district officials are concerned about both the
python's potential impact on the Everglades, where it is being found
from hatchling size up to 14 feet, and the safety of field workers.
District managers and attorneys are deliberating how to respond to the
snakes but have not yet chosen a course of action, district spokesman
Robert Fabricio said. Thayer hopes to do an aerial survey of water
district levees during an upcoming cold snap, when they are flushed out
of the brush by the need to warm their bodies in the sub-tropical sun.
The water district won permission from the Florida Fish and Wildlife
Conservation Commission to arm an employee to shoot or trap any snakes
dwelling on district property if it so chooses, Fabricio said.
"It's not something we can ignore," he said. "It's at the top of the agenda of the district."
Snow welcomes the help.
"We're working together, we've got more eyes out in the field," he said.
Plus one keen canine nose, Oberhofer's beagle, dubbed "Python Pete."
"He shows promise," said Oberhofer, who trains the pooch, descended
from a line of bird-hunting dogs, with a rag reeking of python musk at
her park research center office. The beagle does that work from the end
of a red leash. His master is not too worried about a beefy python
getting the pooch first, but she said she would deploy him carefully.
"I've got to have an eye on him because of the alligators out here," she said.
The beagle idea sprang from a U.S. Department of Agriculture program
that usesdogs to find brown tree snakes in airport cargo so they don't
slip out of Guam, where they wipe out bird populations, and into Hawaii.
Oberhofer, Snow and district officials took the beagle on a python
hunt Thursday along a park north-south levee 12 miles west of Krome
Avenue.
Python Pete got to put his nose to work on one stretch of the levee,
vacuuming scents from sun-baked rock and dust and nosing through
scratchy embankment grasses and growth a few miles south of Tamiami
Trail.
"Pete find it, Pete find it, Pete find it," commanded Oberhofer to the
dog, who seemed to lock in his target odor from time to time but found
no snakes.
When Snow and Oberhofer finally did snare two pythons after
cruising slowly in their truck, it was due to their own keen vision and
rapid reflexes. They pounced on each reptile quickly while Python Pete
sat inside the truck and looked out the windows at the commotion.
After seeing the first snake, Oberhofer jumped off the pickup bed and
seized the 10-footer by the tail, and the snake whipped its head around
to unsuccessfully bite her hand. She and Snow subdued the python and
stuffed it into a mesh bag.
A mile and a quarter down the levee, the team grabbed a more lethargic 7-footer starting to shed its skin.
Snow said he did not like having to destroy creatures like the pythons because of irresponsible exotic pet owners.
There's no concrete evidence the snakes are causing serious harm in the
Everglades, but he said wildlife officials need to be preemptive.
"We have to assume they're guilty and harmful, before we can prove otherwise," Snow said.
Deciding to let them multiply and have their own way with wildlife and
habitat would be as irresponsible as deciding to introduce tigers to
the Everglades, Snow said, adding, "How absurd is that?"
Neil Santaniello can be reached at nsantaniello@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6625.
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