I'll spare you the unpleasant details, but basically I have been pretty miserable since last Wednesday. I've been confined mostly to the apartment, going out only to get some food in tummy or buy some OTC meds to try and alleviate symptoms. I did not go to an urgent care center, because when I've gone in the past, I am told there is nothing they can do. Antibiotics are useless, so basically it’s a waste of half a day sitting in a waiting room with other sick people, and the best you can hope for is to leave with a scrip for a 4-ounce bottle of Robitusen-C (which lasts about a day!) and the usual instructions to rest and drink plenty of fluids. Blah, blah, blah. I feel I’ve gotten over the worst of it, but what I crave most right now is just solid, uninterrupted sleep because all I've gotten lately is just one- to two-hour bursts, where I wake up with a coughing fit, and usually laying in sweat-soaked bedsheets.
So this is a little story about the Burmese Pythons that inhabit the Everglades. It is not a rant, really, as much as an observation. But if these little departures from my usual format do not interest you, you may wish to skip this blog entry.
OK, first I need to emphasize that I do not consider myself an environmentalist for various reasons that I won't go into here. I realize this may surprise some of you, even anger some of you, but that's the way it is. I'm a lot of other very nice things, just not an environmentalist. I can hear some of you say, "But, hey dude, you drive a Prius." OK, true confession: I drive a Prius because of the great money it saves me, both on gasoline and amazing mechanical reliability of Toyota products in general, which keeps me out of the repair shop. The fact that it emits virtually no hydrocarbons into the atmosphere is incidental to me. It's cool that it does that, but it's not the reason I bought the car!
OK, that said, there is some environmental shit going on down here in Florida that is just so amazingly weird and interesting to me, that I simply can't resist it. My top pick is the Burmese Python, which has taken up residence in the Florida Everglades, and is wreaking havoc on a scale that has pretty much every environmentalist down here upset. I learned about this during my airboat ride in the Everglades several weeks ago.
First of all, the Burmese Python is NOT native to the Everglades, nor to any part of Florida for the that matter. As subtropical creatures, it is too cold for them here during the winter (but read on; they have learned to adapt). Thus, they are labeled an "invasive species" here. They don't belong, and they are unwanted. The experts figure the pythons were introduced to the Everglades as the result of being kept as pets. Some idiots just release them into wild when they become too large to manage. Other times, hurricanes hit and destroy homes, with "domesticated" pythons escaping their enclosures and evidently honing in on the Everglades as their preferred residence, no doubt because it most closely resembles their own "hood" down in the Amazon and jungles of Asia. A sufficient number of males and females gathered to create a colony, and they have multiplied like, well, like pythons, with no natural enemy here in Florida to curtail their population. Occasionally, a black bear or alligator or wild boar (also another invasive species here) will kill one if they're under 8 feet in length, and the birds will go after the hatchlings. But if they make it to 8 feet, they're pretty much at the top of the food chain.
Experts "estimate" (estimate in quotes here) that there are somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 Burmese Pythons slithering the marshes and waterways of the Everglades. I'd say that "estimate" pretty constitutes a "no fu**king clue" as to how many of these are out there. What IS known, however, is that they are eating everything in sight, including many rare and endanger species. They survive the winters by finding borrows created by other creatures (raccoons, etc.), evicting the existing tenant (if any) by eating them, and then more or less hibernating during the coldest couple of winter months.
OK, so finally in 2013, the Florida Department of Fish and Wildlife put its foot down and decided enough is enough. They sponsored a "Python Challenge" to rid the Everglades once and for all of this heinous creature. There was a $50 bounty offered on every python. On top of that, a $1,500 prize was awarded to the person who brought in the largest python, and another $1,500 prize to the person who brought in the MOST pythons. The contest brought in 1,600 hunters during the two months that the contest ran. Most of the folks were pros, referred to as "swamp apes" by many people. These are folks who hunt alligators for a living, who if you saw them coming your way on the street, you'd cross over to the other side.
Exactly 68 pythons were captured and humanely euthanized during the two-month event.
The Fish and Wildlife Department issued a brief press release after the event: " ... there will not be another python hunt next year."
They have basically given up. They figure the only thing that will eliminate these creatures, short of an asteroid striking the earth, is when they run out of food and presumably start eating each other.
So there you have it. Unintended consequences. Florida probably has more of this going on than in any place in the country, which is one more thing that makes the Sunshine State so dog-gone interesting. It used to be all Florida had to worry about was Anita Bryant. But at least we knew how many there were of her and her intention of overturning Roe v. Wade. Now they have Burmese Pythons, with no earthly idea of how many there are, nor of their ultimate intentions.
Bruce
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