What it’s like to catch 60 pythons with your bare hands.

This as-told-to is based on a conversation with 29-year-old Taylor Stanberry, the grand prize winner at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s 2025 Florida Python Challenge. The 10-day competition is a conservation event held in the Everglades to fight the invasive Burmese python population in South Florida. The pythons are believed to have been initially introduced through the pet trade and are now threatening the native wildlife. (All captured snakes are killed.) Stanberry caught 60 pythons—three times the number of last year’s winner—and collected $10,000. She is a seasoned snake hunter, but this competition produced some unique challenges, even for her. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I moved to Florida when I was 6 years old. I grew up catching toads and snakes and going fishing, and I just continued to learn about wildlife when I came here. I loved searching for it, especially snakes. Now I’m a government contractor for python removal, and I’ve been catching pythons for over 10 years. [Ed. note: Government agencies employ people year-round to remove and eliminate the invasive pythons.] I was in town during the Python Challenge this year and thought, Hey, why not!

My nights during the competition would start around 7 or 8 p.m. and I would go until 5 or 6 in the morning. Then I would get a couple hours of sleep and take care of the exotic animal sanctuary I run, or possibly go to my other job at a physical therapy facility for dogs. We had to turn in the snakes we caught every 24 hours. We’d have to euthanize them humanely at home, then I’d have to drive another hour to a check-in station where they’d be counted. That was the most stressful part—I had to get home in time to be able to go to a different area to start hunting. And there’s so many extra people in the area during the 10-day competition—people come here from all over the country for this.

The competition takes place in only a few approved areas, but it’s deep in the Everglades. There are main roads people will take at night, and you do hear a lot of car traffic, but there are also frogs and owls hooting at night. I love that. Occasionally you’ll hear bobcats calling, too. We hunt at night because it’s so hot during the day. The snakes aren’t moving in that, and most people aren’t either. Most nights were somewhere between 87 and 92 degrees, and then you add that humidity from the rain. I bring lots of water because you get dehydrated fast when you’re hiking and sweating. And then some bug spray. But honestly, the bug spray doesn’t help. I always say when you have the bug spray on, that’s just flavor to them, because they don’t care how greased up you are—they’ll still attack you.

One of the biggest hunting spots is a main road in the Everglades. There are probably 80 other cars in a few-mile radius. But still, some nights it’s just easier to go to that road and get through the hustle and bustle. People bright you with their car lights and flashlights. Some people drive 60 miles per hour down that road; some are going 5 miles per hour. It’s the people and the driving that are the most dangerous parts of the competition, not the snakes. That’s why I would try to take the boat out and get away from everyone. It’s just a 14-foot jon boat, nothing fancy, and it has light bars on it, so I can light up the side of the canals.

That helps, because a lot of the time, you’re just looking for shiny scales in the grass or water. You’ll see the snakes’ chins—underneath they’re white, so they’ll glow in the lights. You see that nice glimmer, and sometimes they’ll periscope, so their heads stick a few feet out of the grass. The snakes kind of look like a PVC pipe in the grass, but it’s actually a python.

I usually go hunting with my husband. To us, it’s just kind of like a date night. We pick up some food or get our meals prepped and then we head out to the Everglades all night. You definitely need music. And a lot of snacks. You’ve got to bring some candy or something to keep you entertained. I also like to play this game called “Would You Rather?” And I just ask him the most outlandish questions. Most of mine are terrible: “Would you rather eat that pile of maggots or the pig poop we saw on the side of the road?”

Everyone thinks that pythons just throw themselves at me because I post the good moments online, but every night is hit-or-miss. I could go to the same area seven days in a row—one night I might catch nothing, and another night, I could nab 10 pythons in an hour. I just catch them with my bare hands—no equipment or anything. I grab them behind the head and also from the mid-body, because they will start to coil. I never grab them by the head and string them up high because that’s just harassing them.

The first night of the contest, I got a 5½-foot python crossing the road. My hopes weren’t too high at that point. I was like, “Geez, one snake on the first night.” The nights after that got better, but that first snake did bite me. It was my fault. The smaller pythons are very whippy. I grabbed it mid-body instead of just behind the head, so it got one or two teeth on me, just enough to rip my skin very slightly. It was only biting me because I grabbed it first.
Otherwise, they just try to run away. A lot of people think a python bite hurts, but just think of getting pricked with 20 needles. It sounds terrible, but it’s just slight little pricks. Once the bite’s over, it doesn’t hurt anymore. They leave such tiny little tooth holes that you don’t even see them once you stop bleeding.

The third night of the competition is when I got like 30 babies from a nest. I’ve found quite a few python nests over the years. The best way to find one is to spot a cluster of small babies—sometimes they still have umbilical cords. Once the pythons start hatching, that’s when the mom leaves. She doesn’t take care of the babies or anything—she just heads out. That makes them easier to grab.

In this particular instance, the nest I found wasn’t super buried, and the mom was already gone. There were quite a few babies hanging in the trees. Once they start hatching, the babies will go forward and also up. So if the nest is laid underneath a bush, they’ll start crawling up the bushes and get on the trees. They don’t go up 40 feet or anything, but they’ll be up at like the 6-to-10-foot mark. That makes them easy to grab. The second you go up to them, you have to pin them behind the head because they’re ready to fight.

I got some bites that night, too. The babies can be very, very bitey. They just came out of the egg—they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re scared. The younger ones haven’t dealt with people coming near them, or bigger animals—they try to fight alligators or bobcats when they’re small. They kind of learn throughout the years, OK, don’t mess with anything unless you’re ready. So, the bigger the snakes, the smarter they usually are, and they try to get away faster, but the smaller ones are like, What am I doing? Hello?

When there’s so many of them and they’re so little, they can vanish easily up into the bushes, so you have to pick them all up really quickly. You’ve just got to keep grabbing them and putting them in pillowcases. I caught about 20 of them that night before I found the eggs, which were all hatched out. But it was exciting, and it’s good to show the FWC [Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission] how many eggs there were versus how many hatchlings. Finding the nest gave me some confidence about winning, but I knew it was possible for anyone to find a nest this time of year.

On the last night, my husband and I decided to just cruise the road since we were exhausted. There were tons of other people out. On the other nights, the roads would be decently empty by 3 a.m., but on that night, everyone was out late, hoping to catch any snake they could. We were really tired and stressed, but after about 13 hours of hunting, we had seven more pythons in the bag! I knew my numbers were good, but I wasn’t expecting to win. Someone could always have done better than me.

In fact, I didn’t even know I’d won until I was on the podium. They had called me a few weeks before, asking for me to go to the event in Havana, and it’s like an 8-hour drive from me. [The winners of the 2025 Florida Python Challenge were announced at the FWC’s Commission Meeting held in Havana, Florida.] I didn’t know if I could go, but they were like, “Please, please just be there.” Everyone’s very hush-hush during the challenge—you’re not supposed to talk about your numbers or anything because that can be considered cheating.

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And then when I got there, people kept congratulating me, but they still didn’t say what I won. The one lady I was with was like, “Everyone shut up. Don’t tell her.” And I was like, “OK, did I win? I’m still confused.” Even when they announced I’d won, I was like, “OK, so I did win?” I was just in shock. I get terrible stage fright, so being called up to stand in front of people gave me anxiety, and I had no speech prepared. Once I left the event, it really kicked in, though. I was very excited! It’s been a way bigger story than I thought it would be. I didn’t realize I was the first female to win the ultimate grand prize, so I guess that’s really intrigued people. The money from my winnings will go into my rescue, just to help me be able to continue to care for my animals.

I don’t want people to hunt pythons because it’s fun for them, I want them to do it for the right reasons, which is saving the native wildlife and the Everglades. We probably won’t be able to get rid of them all, but as long as we’re trying, that means something.

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