A snake wrangler was deployed to remove a Burmese python in a Miami-Dade residential neighborhood after a resident out for a walk saw the snake hiding inside a palm next to a home.
“Oh gosh, oh my gosh,” an unidentified woman can be heard gasping as wrangler Michael Ronquillo of Humane Iguana Control emerges with the serpent.
The snake’s removal came after neighbors in the Miami suburb of Kendall grew alarmed by its proximity to homes, pets and children as the holidays approached, according to news reports.
Ronquillo identified the snake on camera as a Burmese python and explained how it likely made its way into the residential area.
“So this is a Burmese python that was invading this neighborhood,” he said. “It most likely came by one of the local canals. So we’re happy we were able to catch him.”
The proliferation of pythons in Florida, which are not a native species, have been a persistent problem in the state. Gov. Ron DeSantis recently explained how the snake invasion began.
“They were introduced through the exotic pet trade, and they were released into the wild once they got too big for their owners to keep them in the house,” the governor said in October while announcing the result of program to control the species. “How stupid do you have to be to have released these things out of your house and into the wild?”
The state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission created a Python Action Team – Removing Invasive Constrictors (PATRIC) to attack the problem, with the snakes also posing a threat to native and endangered species in the Everglades.
More than a thousand of the snakes in a three month period under the program, the work largely done by snake hunters, and their skins being used to make boots, belts and wallets, DeSantis said.
The python removed in the Kendall neighborhood measured “roughly 6½ feet long and weighed about 30 pounds,” according to Ronquillo.
If the python had remained in the area, Ronquillo said, it could have posed a threat to pets and wildlife, mainly “cats and native animals such as possums and racoons.”
Ronquillo said he averages one or two removals in urban areas a month.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
