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PUBLISHED: December 11, 2023
READ TIME: 15 minutes
NAPLES, FLORIDA- “It’s a good night for a python hunt.”
The air is thick and soupy. Pythons seem to like stormy, humid air, says professional hunter Amy Siewe, and Hurricane Idalia is about to make landfall in Florida.
In about nine hours over two nights, Siewe catches, and kills, four Burmese python hatchlings. She spots them from atop a so-called snake deck—a platform drilled into the bed of her white Ford truck affixed with floodlights. We cruise down highways 29 and 41 in Naples, driving no faster than 25 miles per hour as she looks for snakes in the grass.
A blonde with a bright smile, Siewe, 46, left behind a thriving real estate business in Indiana in 2019. On a vacation to Florida earlier that year, she’d gone on a python hunt and was hooked. “This is what I’m supposed to be doing,” she says. She used to work for the state python-hunting program, but it didn’t pay enough to live on. Now, she leads small groups of two to four people on guided hunts for $1,800 a night, teaching civilians how to kill the invasive reptile, which has taken hold throughout much of Florida.
Siewe preps me on what to look for: the snakes are mostly motionless, and their eyes don’t shine in the light, but their skin has a plastic sheen. Our best bet is to come across one that’s periscoping, or holding its head high. Siewe shows me a photo on her phone of a python she’d found recently. On the screen, the snake is circled in yellow, but I still have trouble spotting it.
“Python!” she shouts. Dave Roberts, her partner both in life and snake-catching, slams on the brakes and she jumps out. Twisting and squirming, the hatchling struggles in her grasp, its jaws wide open. She holds the snake just behind its head so it can’t bite her.
About two feet in length, these hatchlings are nothing compared to the 19-footer she helped catch last year, but she counts this as a victory. It takes a python about 200 prey animals and three years to reach 10 feet in length, Siewe estimates. “Every [python] that we’re taking out is making a difference.”
I film the catch with my iPhone camera, but when it’s time to kill the python, Siewe has me turn it off—this part’s not for show. “It’s really unfortunate what we have to do to these pythons,” she says. She’s loved snakes her whole life and has “great respect” for them, she says.
“Unfortunately, there’s no option.” Normally she and Roberts use a bolt gun to kill the pythons they catch, but because this one’s so small, Dave uses a pellet gun while she holds the snake steady. The wriggling tail instantly goes still.