On a recent afternoon, Carl Jackson and his family were hunting for pythons on a dirt road about 30 miles east of Naples in Big Cypress National Preserve.
Jackson said he turned his truck around to retrace his tracks. A few miles down the road he noticed something — python tracks crossing the road, and they were over the tracks of his tires. The snakes must have just crossed!
He jumped out of the truck and followed the tracks, which seemed to be from a smaller snake, into the underbrush between the road and a canal. Within seconds he saw a big head sticking out of the brush.
When he jabbed out and caught the snake behind the head, he was shocked: The snake was 16 feet, 10 inches long, and 202 pounds, the second heaviest invasive Burmese python ever caught in Florida.
“When I grabbed her I thought, ‘Oh crap, she’s bigger than I thought!’
Chaos ensued. “She drug me through the brush, over a red and black ant hill and started dragging me into some other brush, and I’m yelling, ‘I need help!’ At that point my adopted son Ryker (Young), he got to me. She was starting to coil around me and squish me to the ground.”
Young helped uncoil her and stretch her out. Still the snake battled. “The snake started pulling Ryker towards me like he was nothing.” Jackson said his son is 6-foot-2, 190 pounds.
His wife, Tasha Jackson, and stepdaughter, Jazzlyn Bateman, joined in as well, and managed to tape the big snake’s mouth shut.
Carl Jackson kneels on a dirt road with 16-foot 10-inch, 202-pound female Burmese python that he caught in Big Cypress National Preserve. (Courtesy Carl Jackson)
That didn’t calm her down. She bolted for the canal and took Jackson with her, Jackson said. By the time his family was able to stop her he was a foot from the canal, Jackson said.
Once they got her on the road, they measured her: 16 feet, 10 inches long with a 26-inch girth, much thicker than a 17-foot snake he caught last year.
They later weighed her in at 202 pounds. She was full of egg follicles.
Jackson, who moved to Florida from Utah last year to hunt pythons for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, sold the skin to Inversa, a leather company that specializes in skins of invasive animals.
The Turner Road area of Big Cypress is one of the most intensively hunted areas in the state, yet it still produced large snakes that have likely lived in the area for years, invisible to passing cars.
Carl Jackson poses with 16-foot 10-inch, 202-pound female Burmese python that he caught in Big Cypress National Preserve. (Courtesy Carl Jackson)
Big Cypress also produced the longest invasive Burmese python ever caught in Florida, a 19-foot snake caught at night by the Glades Boys, Jake Waleri and Stephan Gauta, in 2023.
The heaviest Burmese python caught in Florida, a 215-pound beast, was wrestled from heavy cover just west of Big Cypress by biologists Ian Bartoszek and Ian Easterling of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
The Conservancy’s “scout snake” program tracks male during the fall and winter breeding season.
The males inevitably lead biologists to large females full of 30 to more than 100 egg follicles. Their goal is to remove the females and their future offspring.
Jackson’s catch happened just before a recent cold snap, and Jackson thinks that may be significant.
“My last big one that I caught last year, my 17-foot, 10-incher, I caught it a day before a cold front as well. I think they know when that cold front’s comin’, so they try to do whatever they gotta do before it gets cold, because once it gets cold they usually hunker down for a couple days and don’t move.”
Burmese pythons were introduced to North America by the exotic pet trade of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Over time, some escaped their owners while others were intentionally set free. Those snakes went on to reproduce and thrive in South Florida’s subtropical climate, decimating some ecosystems.
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Areas of South Florida where the snakes have become dominant have seen a 90% to 99% decrease in sightings of mammals such as rabbits, opossums and raccoons. The snakes have been documented eating alligators up to 6 feet long and deer, from fawns to 77-pound adults.
The invasive apex predators have expanded their reproductive range north from Everglades National Park to Lake Okeechobee and the suburbs of Fort Myers.
After dropping the big female off with the taxidermist, the Jackson family returned to the capture site in Big Cypress and managed to catch a 10-foot male who was likely interested in the female.
Of the corpulent female, Jackson said, “This one is special to me, not just because of the size, but it was my first daytime catch, and my first catch with my family, because they had just gotten cleared to be assistants the day before.”
