Florida couple Christina Kraus and Aaron Mann captured 87 invasive pythons from the Everglades in July, setting that month’s record and netting them thousands of dollars in payouts for helping remove the invasive reptiles.
As part of Florida’s Python Elimination Program, the South Florida Water Management District and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission pays python-hunting contractors $50 per snake up to 4 feet long, then $25 per foot after that. So, for example, catching a 10-foot python under the program will net a contractor $200 for that snake.
If a contractor finds a verified active nest, that earns another $200. But even if you don’t find pythons, you’ll still earn hourly wages — between $18 and $30 per hour — for hunting.
Add all that up, and Mann and Kraus say they’re not far from paying their bills as professional python hunters. In addition to their hourly wages for July (they estimate they worked upwards of 180 hours that month), their 87-snake total included a nest with 33 hatchlings each about 2 feet long, and a whopping 14-foot python (worth $300) that weighed 92 pounds. If you catch more pythons than any other contractor in a month, the program also pays out a $1,000 bonus.
But all those dollars come with a few big caveats: Hunting invasive pythons, including the massive Burmese python, in the Everglades is dangerous — mostly alligators flipping boats and GPS units going haywire — and damn hard work.
“You don’t get one every time,” says Kraus, who was born and raised in Naples. “You maybe go out there 50 times and you don’t see anything.”
Hourly wages help cushion the time contractors like Kraus and Mann spend driving around looking for pythons. The program pays either $13, $18, or $30 per hour depending on the area you’re hunting, with a cap of 10 hours per day. Only designated regions count, and those higher rates are paid out for higher-priority areas.
“It’s definitely unrealistic for someone to just come to Florida and think they can make a living doing this,” says Mann.
Kraus and Mann started hunting pythons about five years ago, after reading news stories about the toll invasive snakes take on native species in the Everglades including small mammals, panthers, raptors, bobcats, marsh birds, native snakes and even deer. They figured they could help.
So they outfitted their Ford F-150 with a 9-foot platform. It allows one person to scan the marshland for pythons on muggy summer nights while the other drives — and scans the ground and guardrails where pythons often hunt. The couple also has a jon boat they use for winding through alligator-filled canals. Three years after they began hunting on their own, the state and water management district hired them as professional contractors.
The Python Elimination Program’s most well-known event is the annual Florida Python Challenge, which drew more than 900 people to the Everglades for a 10-day period in July. Participating hunters (and more than a few aspiring hunters) removed 294 pythons, vying for a $10,000 pot that goes to the hunter with the most snakes.
Still, contractors are the ones making the biggest overall dent in the python population, say Kraus and Mann. In fact, contractors have removed more than 16,000 pythons from the Everglades since 2017, according to Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The couple only caught a few snakes the first year or two after they started. In the last two years, however, they’ve captured and removed more than 200 pythons. While Kraus didn’t outline exactly how much the team earned in July, she did estimate they searched for snakes between 4 to 6 hours every single night, for a total close to 180 hours.
Taylor Stanberry won this year’s Challenge with 60 pythons. She and her husband have been professional contractors for the better part of the last decade.
Stanberry estimates she’s caught more than 1,000 invasive snakes since she started, but still runs a wildlife sanctuary as her day job. To her, python hunting is seasonal — it’s busy in the summer during breeding and when the snakes are moving more, then it dries up in the winter. Even though she and her husband hunt using their boat and e-bikes as much as possible, they’ve already put 100,000 miles on their Subaru in the last two years hunting invasive snakes.
“In the winter, they aren’t moving around as much,” says Stanberry. “You could get breeding balls where there might be five males on one female. I haven’t gotten that yet, but that would be a good day.”
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While the money is great to have, the contractors say, their motivations largely focus on the overall mission of removing pythons and helping Florida’s native species.
“In certain areas where their population hasn’t grown as big, I have noticed more native wildlife coming out, so I do think it’s working in certain areas but not everywhere,” Stanberry says. “But every python we get out is eating one less animal.”
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