Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (4 page)

2000. How many there are and how they got there are sources of fierce

debate. Herpers blame Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which damaged

snake breeders’ warehouses and allowed dozens to escape. But when

pressed, even they acknowledge that an occasional pet owner may have

set theirs free when it got too big.

The python invasion didn’t get much attention until 2003, when a

tourist videotape of an alligator battling one hit the airwaves. Even-

tually the python slithered away, leaving at least a sliver of hope that

alligators, as feared as they are by humans, might be able to protect

Florida against the slithery invaders. Two years later another image

killed any optimism. A python that apparently misjudged its capacity

was found burst open with a dead 6-foot American alligator poking out

of its gut. The photograph made world news and went viral over the

Internet. Here was a 13-foot-long snake loose in the wild that could kill

Florida’s most feared natural predator. And it wasn’t alone. A federal

biologist estimated that there could be as many as one hundred thou-

sand of these giant snakes multiplying and gobbling up native wildlife.

proof

The news created a panic, and not just because the snakes threatened

one of the world’s remaining ecological treasures. If these snakes could

swallow 6-foot alligators, they could surely eat people.

Then it happened. Like a disturbing scene from a horror flick, a

pet albino Burmese python escaped from her cage in the middle of

the night, slithered into the crib of a two-year-old Bushnell girl, and

squeezed the toddler to death. A medical examiner who testified in the

manslaughter trial of the child’s mother and her live-in boyfriend said

that given the child’s puncture wounds, the snake had tried to swallow

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her.

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The mom and her boyfriend were sent away to prison for manslaugh-

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ter, third-degree murder, and child neglect; the python now lives in an

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undisclosed Florida wildlife sanctuary.

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The python panic rose to hysteria. The state banned Floridians from

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acquiring seven varieties of pythons, the anaconda, and Nile monitors

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as pets. Then the federal government banned the importation and in-

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terstate sales of Burmese pythons, yellow anacondas, and two other

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pythons. Preexisting pet owners can keep their snakes as long as they

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pay one hundred dollars to register them and inject them with identify-

ing microchips.

The FFWCC considers education and these amnesty days as the best

defenses against a wider infestation of exotic animals in the wild. So

far, they are right about one thing: A lot of snake owners want to get

rid of them. Herpers started showing up with their reptiles about a

half hour before the event opened. Two plastic ponds are filled to the

brim with knotted pillowcases of snakes, an undulating patchwork of

designs and colors. Glass aquariums, cages, and big plastic storage con-

tainers hold even bigger snakes such as Aretha the Retic—a reticulated

python that’s as long as a minivan.

Burmese pythons supposedly are easygoing, but the name Miss Hiss

is loaded with dread, if not nightmares. She’s 14 feet long and weighs

more than 100 pounds. Her intake form also notes that “she might be

aggressive” and is especially nasty when hungry. Sounds like a winner.

As the intake of animals winds down, men, women and children

trickle in and just stand around, waiting. Turns out the state isn’t keep-

ing the animals. “Oh, no, they are all hopefully going home with some-

one today,” a state wildlife worker tells me. Registering the shock on

my face, she adds, “We don’t have a place to house them.”

The event is sort of a swap-and-shop. Some pet owners drop off, and

proof

others take a few home. Or in the case of Gator Ron, swap out.

Ron is hoping to pick up some baby alligators. His have grown too

big to hold for photo ops. He’s strategically hanging out at the intake

table.

Lucky for him, a young man walks up with three baby alligators.

Each is about 2 feet long with its snout wrapped shut. “Let’s just say a

friend caught them when they had just hatched out,” the young man

tells a wildlife worker.

Ron quickly shuffles over using his wooden cane and lets a wildlife

worker know that he wants them.

The crowd in front of the tent has thickened. More than four dozen

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men, women, and children shift in anticipation. A gray-haired science

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teacher is looking for a corn snake for the classroom terrarium. A mom

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wearing a Jacksonville Herpetological Society T-shirt says she’s open

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to anything that she doesn’t have to feed a live rat. Her blond-haired

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sons—four, seven, and ten—are antsy. They had just ridden three-and-

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one-half hours from Jacksonville.

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The family already shares their home with two geckos, two tortoises,

two frogs, aquariums of fish, and enough serpents to cast a horror flick.

“I live with forty snakes in my house,” Shannon jokes: “We don’t have

much company.”

Shannon’s a rescuer, a Florence Nightingale of animals. She used to

be terrified of snakes, and took in cats and birds. But her kids are al-

lergic to pet dander, so by default she had to cozy up to herps. She now

has one of her own. “We don’t have any venomous ones, mostly rat

snakes and constrictors,” she says.

I ask her and her husband, Rick, if they are concerned about hav-

ing constrictors around the kids in light of the Bushnell two-year-old’s

grizzly death. They bristle. “Those people shouldn’t have had it,” Shan-

non says. “Some people just shouldn’t have them if they aren’t going

to take care of them. He [the snake owner] hadn’t been feeding it, and

it was starving!”

“They didn’t have it locked up either,” Rick says.

(The Bushnell couple admitted that their aquarium was topped only

with a quilt.)

“We keep all of ours in cages,” Shannon says, “and don’t let them out

unless we’re playing with them.”

“Exactly how do you play with a snake?” I ask.

proof

“You can let one crawl up your arm and onto your shoulders. Some

really like being held,” Snake Mom says. “Like people, they have dif-

ferent personalities; some can be friendly and some don’t like being

messed with.”

Then There Was One

By 1:30 p.m. about 110 animals have been turned in, mostly reptiles.

More than forty people stand outside the tent like early birds at an es-

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tate sale. There are so many shoppers that FFWCC passes out numbers

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for a lottery because they can’t all fit under the tent at once. A worker

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shouts out the first round, and the lucky ones giddily file inside. They

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browse. They study snakes, lizards, and tortoises up, down, all around.

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They ask questions.

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“Can I see this one?” Snake Mom asks a worker as she holds up a

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bulky knotted pillowcase tagged as a ball python. The worker hesitates,

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saying they don’t have time to pull out all the snakes. The perky mom

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melts his resistance with a smile. He pulls out the snake. Shannon

leans over, squinches her nose, shakes her head no, and moves on to

the lizards.

People can adopt only one animal per round. Some go through four

times.

The testy giant African tortoise is going home with a young guy in

flip-flops and a Ska band T-shirt. He says he plans to take the tortoise

back to his home in Holiday and use it in an animal act that he does at

a local American Legion and anywhere else that will pay him. That’s if

he can fit the 100-pound-plus tortoise and pond into his compact car.

A Busch Gardens worker helps him lug it through the parking lot,

while Mr. Tortoise continues to try to get his short foot over the edge

of the plastic pond. They sit him down beside the car, and the new tor-

toise owner clears the backseat. Meanwhile, another couple walks up

with a smaller African tortoise. They say they came just to observe, but

they enjoy showing off their tortoise, which is outpacing them. “He

could walk a mile,” the man says, following his pet. “Sometimes I walk

him through the neighborhood and he can wear me out.”

With the backseat empty and the front seats pushed forward to the

max, the new tortoise owner and the wildlife worker try to squeeze

the pond into the backseat as Mr. Tortoise becomes more frantic in his

proof

escape attempts. They attack the backseat straight on, but the pond

is just too wide. They tilt it this way and that. In sweaty exasperation,

they set the pond and tortoise down on the grass. The owner looks

back and forth between the backseat and the reptile. He’s determined

to take it. The tortoise is worth about $1,200, and he’s just gotten it

for free. In one motion, he grabs the tortoise on both sides of its thick

shell, lifts, and sits it on the velour car seat. Mr. Tortoise, clearly puz-

zled by his new surroundings, for once doesn’t move. They bend the

pond, fit it through the doorway and somehow manage to slide it under

Mr. Tortoise. The pond fills the back, crushing against the front seats.

An angry Mr. Tortoise returns to escape attempts. The new owner and

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his wife jump in the front, their knees against the dash. They set out on

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the hour-long drive home—no doubt to the sound of claws frantically

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scratching to escape.

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Back at the tent, the crowd has thinned, but plenty of snakes re-

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main. Wildlife workers are encouraging shoppers to pick out two and

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three at a time. A couple of men in home-eviction service T-shirts study

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Aretha the Retic and Miss Hiss, snakes large enough to clear a house of

any squatters. Anthony, the boss, already owns about twenty snakes.

Since Floridians can no longer buy many of the constrictors as pets,

Amnesty Days are about the only legal way they can get one. Antho-

ny’s been working the Amnesty Day circuit, adopting snakes, birds, and

chinchillas. Like Ron and Lynn Gard, he turned in two snakes. “I’ve

handled snakes most all my life, but those African rock pythons were

just too mean,” he says.

Undaunted by Miss Hiss’s rap sheet, Anthony dons leather gloves

and begins uncoiling her from her pet carrier. True to her name, she

hisses, flicking her long ribbon of a tongue. His home-eviction em-

ployee and a Busch Gardens worker move closer to help. The snake

seems endless. By the time she’s fully out of her cage, Anthony has

threaded her behind his neck, and it takes both him and his employee

to carry her over for a microchip injection.

Wearing the snake behind his neck and across his body like a sash,

Anthony hurries her to his pickup, while his employee follows along

carrying the snake’s tail end. They store her in a built-in snake box and

then secure the rest of Anthony’s cache from the day: three other py-

thons, a couple of boa constrictors, and a yellow-naped Amazon parrot,

which usually sell for more than a thousand dollars at pet stores. All in

proof

all, a pretty good catch for the day if you happen to like big snakes and

talking birds.

A Polk County father-and-son team adopt Aretha the Retic. Her

glass terrarium barely fits horizontally in their pickup.

The Jacksonville herper family ends up with two bearded dragons, a

California corn snake, and a tarantula. The boys seem pleased, the old-

est petting the overgrown lizard as it cleaves to his shirt. The dad walks

around grinning with the other lizard on his chest.

Gator Ron is tickled to have the baby gators. The monitor? He’s go-

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ing to Gatorland in Orlando. All but one sickly python goes home with

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someone. Fish & Wildlife celebrate the day as a huge success.

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Want a Gator with That Fill-Up?

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Given that two-thirds of Floridians weren’t born in the state, many

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Fla-zoons are also alien to Florida. They were brave enough to leave

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their native environment and settle on the fringe of America, a land of

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hurricanes, sinkholes, and people different from themselves. They are

risk takers by nature. And the native Floridians? They descended from

people who were perhaps even more so. Pioneering the swampy state

before air-conditioning and mosquito control took a strong constitu-

tion. Trying to tame a wild animal that can take your head off in a sin-

gle bite or strangle you in the middle of the night is a risky proposition.

No doubt, the state’s tourism industry also influences the Fla-zoon

mind-set. Ever since tourists have had cars, exotic animals have helped

lure them to Florida. Early tourism pioneers used creatures from afar

to create an illusion that Florida was a magical, exotic wonderland full