Discussions about the U.S.-Mexico border wall usually revolve around people, which makes sense given the wall’s core purpose. But a handful of biologists, politicians, and conservationists recognized early on that the wall would have some seriously detrimental effects on wildlife by separating distinct populations, splitting core habitat, and interrupting migration routes. Still, the Trump administration built an additional 458 miles of border wall, using already-earmarked military and defense dollars to do so.

Soon after construction began, a coalition of 18 states and two environmental organizations sued then-President Trump and his administration for diverting federal funds toward the controversial project without Congressional approval. Now, four years later, a settlement has been reached. And it contains a lot of wins for wildlife, officials say.

“President Trump’s border wall … was highly destructive, damaging private property and sensitive desert ecosystems, and blocking important wildlife corridors,” Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM) tells Outdoor Life. “This settlement agreement is a step forward in restoring these watersheds and landscapes and protecting the future for species such as the Mexican gray wolves, jaguars, and Sonoran pronghorn.”

These measures include numerous on-the-ground mitigation projects, namely the construction of 24 wildlife passages and opening of nine stormwater gates along the wall. Such passages will benefit a variety of wildlife species in addition to the ones Heinrich mentions, including federally endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep, ocelots, Coues, whitetail, and mule deer. The Department of Homeland Security will also put $25 million toward acquiring a 1,300-acre chunk of critical wildlife habitat east of San Diego, and millions more will go toward endangered and threatened wildlife conservation research, according to the settlement document.

Holes in the Wall

The document outlines plans for 20 small wildlife passages that can be no smaller than 8.5 by 11 inches—big enough to allow ocelots, coyotes, foxes, rodents, and other small critters through the wall to the other side. In addition, four large passages will interrupt the wall—two in Arizona and two in New Mexico. The exact locations of the four new passages, which will measure roughly seven feet by five feet, remain redacted in the document. But they will be in remote, unfrequented areas where surveillance and other security measures will be feasible, Sierra Club borderland coordinator Erick Meza told the Arizona Daily Star. 

“We selected these openings in areas … where we have historically seen not so many migrants moving through these spaces,” Meza said. “[Border Patrol] will be monitoring [the areas] with the use of technology … the technology is already there in some of these cases.” 

These crossing locations were also selected with Mexican gray wolves, black bears, bison, Chihuahuan pronghorn, and jaguars in mind. But countless other wildlife species will also benefit from greater freedom of movement. In a study on border wildlife conducted by environmental organization Sky Island Alliance, 65 trail cameras scattered along 30 miles of the border recorded more than 43,000 wildlife detections in three years. Photographed species varied from birds and rodents to javelina, mountain lions, and one particularly good-looking whitetail still in velvet.

In addition to the new passages, nine stormwater gates will remain open full-time. As the document reads: “DHS reserves the right to close the gates if exigent circumstances or border security operations warrant temporary closure” and “place alternative forms of wildlife-friendly infrastructure near the gates and install barrier system attributes near the gates to detect unauthorized entry into the United States.”

Similarly, DHS will install gates on the four new large passages to close in emergency situations. Nearby barbed wire fencing—strung specifically to not hinder wildlife movement—will contain cattle.  

Buying Dirt

Another portion of the settlement involves DHS putting $25 million toward a 1,291-acre property acquisition east of San Diego. If the deal goes through, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife would take over what is currently known as Otay Ranch Village 14 and Project Areas 16 and 19. These parcels of land, which were at one point destined for real estate development, would remain untouched and receive “conservation status,” according to the document. 

The Otay Ranch Village 14 site was originally slated for the construction of over 1,100 homes. But the project hit snags during the environmental review process and the development never came to fruition. Now, it could help build the connectivity of other nearby habitat areas, namely the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge to the north, the Otay Mountain Wilderness to the south, and state lands to the east. The border sits about six miles south of the property.

DHS’ $25 million infusion would still come up short of the roughly $60 million the property is valued at. Non-profit funding would need to cover the remaining $35 million. If this money doesn’t materialize, the DHS’ $25 million will go toward other environmental remediation and mitigation efforts. 

Critters on the Border

As an additional wildlife conservation measure, DHS will put $1.1 million toward research monitoring Peninsular bighorn sheep, Sonoran desert pronghorn, Mexican gray wolves, jaguars, and ocelots in the borderlands. As the plan is currently written, $500,000 of that money will go toward a pre-existing Peninsular bighorn sheep study conducted by CDFW. These sheep are federally endangered, and the last range-wide population survey conducted in 2020 counted 884 sheep across 1,238 square miles of southern California. 

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Research will also focus on federally-listed jaguars, which are thought to be nearly extirpated from the U.S. The elusive cats once thrived in the American Southwest before habitat loss, poaching, and human conflict decimated the population. As rumblings of reintroducing jaguars to the region radiate through wildlife conservation circles, habitat fragmentation as a result of the border wall and sprawling suburban developments like the Otay Ranch Villages remain a concern.

Getting to Work  

The settlement includes countless other detailed instructions for remediation work (i.e. building materials that need cleaning up) and restrictions on future development (i.e. no wildlife-unfriendly wall or fence construction along specified stretches of the border) that DHS will need to adhere to going forward. The document also sets deadlines for the cash payments DHS must dish out for wildlife research and the Otay Ranch Village 14 acquisition.

Aside from the environmental remediation and mitigation demands of the settlement, DHS must reinvest roughly $427.3 million into the 15 military construction projects across nine states that the money was originally earmarked for.

The post Feds Agree to Add Wildlife Crossings to Border Wall Following Lawsuit appeared first on Outdoor Life.

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After a two-year investigation that involved Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers driving four and a half hours to Oakley, Kansas, a poacher has been brought to justice for illegally killing a bull moose in Teller County, Colorado and then leaving the animal to rot in the woods.   

Oakley resident Steven Samuelson, 33, entered a guilty plea in Teller County District Court on July 10, according to a CPW press release. Charges included felony willful destruction of wildlife, as well as hunting without a proper and valid big game license, aggravated illegal possession of wildlife, failure to prepare wildlife for human consumption, hunting in a careless manner, and illegal take of wildlife, which are all misdemeanors.

Samuelson illegally arrowed the bull moose in September 2021 in a wooded area north of Divide, Colorado, near Pike National Forest. He might have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for the trail cameras that other hunters had hung in the area. The cameras captured photographs of both Samuelson and the moose, and they helped pinpoint the time when the moose was killed.

After seeing these images, the parties reported the crime to CPW and led officers to the dead bull. They found evidence that Samuelson had tried but failed to remove the head. He’d also covered the moose in branches in an effort to hide the crime.

Samuelson illegally arrowed the bull moose in September 2021 in a wooded area north of Divide, Colorado, which lies northwest of Colorado Springs near Pike National Forest. The people who reported the incident to CPW had game cameras hung in the area. These cameras caught both Samuelson and the moose on film. 

When the reporting parties led CPW officers to the location of the moose, they found a large bull that showed evidence of Samuelson’s attempts at removing the head. Samuelson also tried to cover the moose in tree branches to hide the crime.

“This moose was treated unethically and that is something we take very seriously,” said CPW officer and assistant area wildlife manager Travis Sauder. “We are fortunate members of the public share our passion for wildlife and helped us catch the poacher. We rely on honest sportspeople to help us solve these types of cases.”

Finding Samuelson was less easy. Officers used what CPW calls “old-fashioned police work” to eventually track him down. In coordination with the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, two CPW officers drove to Kansas to confront Samuelson at his workplace. They also executed a search warrant on his home. They seized his bow, his cell phone, and other belongings thought to contain evidence. 

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For the felony charge, Samuelson received a two-year deferred jail sentence. That means he won’t have to serve the sentence if he meets all the terms of his plea agreement. He also has to pay a $20,000 fine and lost 65 points against his hunting license. Only 20 points were necessary to suspend his hunting privileges, which means he’s now 45 points in the hole. 

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Brian L. Tidwell of Clarkston, Washington, is being held in Idaho’s Nez Perce County Jail on $25,000 bond after what can only be described as a whirlwind 24 hours on the run. Tidwell currently faces three Class C felony charges: two counts of eluding a pursuing police officer and one count of first-degree reckless burning. He led officers on a high-speed chase across multiple counties. Tidwell was also suspected of poaching a bull elk at one point, though officials later realized the head, neck, and antlers seen sticking out of his truck bed were actually a part of a shoulder mount.

On June 30, Asotin County Sheriff’s Office deputy James Gibson responded to a call about a fire at a residence in Clarkston, Washington, according to arrest records obtained from the Asotin County Clerk’s office by Outdoor Life. The report shows that Tidwell was living near where the fire occurred, and a friend of Tidwell’s neighbor had made the call. Gibson got in touch with Tidwell’s neighbor, who alleged that Tidwell was burning trash at his residence when the fire got out of control and spread to the neighbor’s residence. Tidwell’s entire trailer home, multiple farm implements, and the back of his neighbor’s barn and outhouse had all been damaged. 

Two weeks later, while Gibson was on patrol at roughly 7:30 p.m., he spotted Tidwell’s truck, an orange and black Dodge, at a local park. Tidwell was still a suspect in the burning incident at the time, so Gibson parked his patrol car in front of Tidwell’s truck and approached the driver’s side of the cab, which appeared to be empty. But as Gibson got closer, Tidwell popped up and immediately turned his truck on, saying he had to go. Gibson opened the truck door and told him he wasn’t free to go, but Tidwell slammed the door shut again and sped away. 

A high-speed pursuit began and another officer got involved, chasing Tidwell down the highway while Gibson stationed himself closer to town. Eventually, Tidwell drove back in front of Gibson again, who observed him run a four-way traffic stop full of cars. The second officer noted that Tidwell was exhibiting signs of driving under the influence. As the chase continued, Tidwell eventually drove the wrong way up a one-way exit ramp, forcing several vehicles to pull off the road. Once he got to the top of the ramp, he fled across the Washington state line (formed by the Snake River) into Lewiston, Idaho. The Asotin County officers communicated with the Lewiston Police Department and Nez Perce County, who eventually called off the chase for the night.

The next day at 6:00 p.m., Gibson received word from the dispatcher that a vehicle matching the description of Tidwell’s truck was fleeing Whitman County. Gibson set up on the Clarkston side of the Red Wolf Bridge and watched as Tidwell’s truck drove across. As soon as he crossed, Gibson turned on his lights and siren and attempted to pull over Tidwell, but Tidwell drove straight into a heavily trafficked area, forcing Gibson to abandon the pursuit again for the safety of pedestrians and other vehicles. Later, Tidwell came back into the county. Officers tried to use spike strips to stop the truck, but just barely missed the tires. Tidwell escaped back into Lewiston again, where he was eventually captured on foot.

A press release from the Whitman County Sheriff’s Office, which was posted to their Facebook page, provides some different insight into what happened on the second day of the pursuit.

“The vehicle in question had been reported to [the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife] earlier in the day of possibly poaching in the area and at that time the vehicle was not located,” the press release reads. “Deputies attempted to stop the vehicle using emergency lights on Steptoe Canyon Road but the driver refused to pull over and drove around the patrol car that was northbound on Steptoe Canyon Road. While following the vehicle an elk head with antlers was observed in the bed of the pickup.”

WDFW communications manager Staci Lehman confirmed with Outdoor Life that WDFW is not conducting a poaching investigation into the incident since the antlers and head in the truck bed turned out to be part of a shoulder mount and not a poached carcass. But Lehman also says that law enforcement is looking into whether the mount could have been stolen. 

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Class C felonies get a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. If Tidwell is convicted of all three charges, he could face triple that. But the punishment doesn’t stop there. Because one of his “attempting to elude a pursuing police officer” charges involves endangering countless lives with his reckless escape driving, he will get a mandatory 366-day sentence enhancement to whatever penalties he receives, court documents read.

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Updated July 17: Mountain lion tracks leading away from Haystack Rock indicate that the mountain lion has left, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife reported in a Facebook post. Cannon Beach has reopened to visitors.

Visitors at Oregon’s Cannon Beach encountered a predator-related beach closure on the morning of July 16, but not for the kind of predator beaches usually close for. Instead of a toothy shark swimming through the surf, photographers glimpsed a mountain lion perched on Haystack Rock at roughly 6:40 a.m.

The sighting prompted local officials with the Oregon State Police, Oregon State Parks, and the City of Cannon Beach Police to close off a section of the iconic beach, which is part of the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge. They also closed all access roads leading to the area. The beach was still closed as of 9:20 p.m. on July 16 and would remain closed overnight, as the mountain lion was still on the rock, Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuges wrote in a Facebook post.

The beach and road closures were designed to give the cougar an escape route off the rock and back to the coast. It remains unclear whether officials have any plans to try hazing or otherwise encouraging the cougar to climb off the rock.  

The cougar looks wet in photos that were captured the morning before the closure, indicating that it might have swum at least part of the way to the rock. Standing at 235 feet tall and less than 1,000 feet from the shores of Cannon Beach, Haystack Rock is accessible by foot at low tide, and is often surrounded by interesting tidal pools and creatures that draw lots of attention from beachgoers. (Cannon Beach was also a shooting location for movies like The Goonies and Twilight, making it a busy tourist destination.) But low tide on July 16 was at 7:52 a.m., well after when the cougar was first spotted. This means it either walked to the rock during a prior low tide or it swam there during the night. 

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Contrary to popular belief, mountain lions are strong swimmers and will frequently dive into the water to chase prey. Since Haystack Rock provides a major nesting ground for tufted puffins, there’s a chance the cat was attracted by the birds. But now that the cat is on the island, it has yet to climb up to the nesting grounds to feed on any birds, OINWR reports in its Facebook post. Hatchlings are plentiful at the moment, as breeding season began in April. 

The post Mountain Lion Lurking on Popular Oregon Rock Triggers Beach Closure appeared first on Outdoor Life.

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Wolves and beavers occupy many of the same habitats in the North Woods, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the apex predators occasionally hunt and kill the large rodents. But according to researchers there, it’s rare to witness this—and even rarer to catch it on video. Which is why researchers with the Voyageurs Wolf Project were so excited to share the recent footage they captured inside Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park.

“A super-duper, amazingly lucky trail camera capture: we finally caught a wolf hunting a beaver on video!!” they wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday. “We cannot overstate how rare such observations are.”

Researchers captured the short video clip using a trail camera, which was placed near the top of a beaver dam. This is one of many trail cams they’ve installed throughout the park, and the group regularly shares videos of gray wolves, beavers, black bears, and other native wildlife.  

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This recently-published clip opens with the wolf running full tilt down the dam after a beaver. Another wolf follows close behind. The beaver doesn’t seem to notice its pursuers until the last second, but that’s all the time it needs to scramble off the dam and get away. The wolf tries biting down on the beaver’s tail but misses it by mere inches.

“In this instance the beaver was able to escape into deep water in a small pond below the dam,” the researchers point out. “But if there wasn’t that pond, the beaver would have been in trouble.”

Speaking to the rarity of the footage they captured, the researchers explained that, to their knowledge, the first recording of a wolf killing a beaver took place on a Quebec logging road in 2015. The Project’s researchers teamed up with the person who filmed that encounter to write a study that was later published in the scientific journal Ecosphere.

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In the years that followed, they actively sought photographs, videos, and other visual documentation of wolves hunting beavers. But besides the occasional trail camera photos that people sent in, which didn’t show much, the researchers haven’t seen any videos of a wolf hunting and killing a beaver since the 2015 incident.

“What is amazing is that wolves regularly hunt and kill beavers across a wide swath of North America, Europe and Asia and yet so few people have ever actually seen this happen,” they write. “In sum, a super common event that is rarely observed.”

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Forget sharks. Surfers on the Central California coast are dealing with a different kind of marine menace this summer: an oddly aggressive sea otter. The otter has been accosting surfers near Santa Cruz, hijacking their boards, and even riding in the occasional wave—leading wildlife officials to try and capture the animal. One of these close encounters was captured on video and shared to Instagram on July 11:

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At the beginning of the video, the surfer is already in the water while the sea otter climbs onto his board and starts gnawing on it. The surfer tries rocking the longboard from side to side and flipping it upside down, but the otter is unshakable. It keeps biting chunks out of the surfboard and briefly charges the man when he gets too close. The exasperated surfer eventually gives up, swimming beside his commandeered board while the otter stays put.

“This was a very aggressive encounter and scary to watch,” reads the caption. “Please consider this video as a warning to how strong and forceful this animal is and [it] should be avoided if at all possible!”

This wasn’t a one-off occurrence, either. Several surfers and sea kayakers have dealt with the hard-charging otter in recent weeks, with three incidents taking place just last weekend, according to the New York Times. The otter’s behavior has gotten so out of hand that it is now considered a public safety risk, and local wildlife officials started trying to capture it on Thursday. Working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, a team of trained specialists with the Monterey Bay Aquarium has so far been unsuccessful in its attempts.

“She’s been quite talented at evading us,” Monterey Bay Aquarium spokesperson Jessica Fujii told the Times earlier this week. She also explained that the otter has a history with the aquarium, which helps account for its unusually bold behavior.

Known by officials as Otter 841, the five-year-old female was born in captivity. Her mother had become habituated to humans feeding it, and after boarding multiple kayaks in search of handouts, she was captured in 2018 and taken to the Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center in Santa Cruz, where researchers quickly learned the otter was pregnant. Her sole offspring, Otter 841, was brought to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to be rehabilitated before being released into the Pacific.

“After one year of being in the wild without issue, we started receiving reports of her interactions with surfers, kayakers, and paddle boarders,” Fujii said. “We do not know why this started. We have no evidence that she was fed. But it has persisted in the summers for the last couple of years.”

While 841’s behavior was definitely out of the ordinary—most sea otters are terrified of people—locals found it cute at first. Over time, however, the animal grew bolder. And since Southern sea otters are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act, there wasn’t much that surfers, kayakers, and other oceangoers could do to fend it off.  

“I tried to paddle away but I wasn’t able to get far before it bit off my leash,” recalled one surfer who was forced to abandon his board in the surf last weekend. (Judging from his description, this was likely the same surfer who was filmed in the above video.) “I tried to get it off by flipping the board over and pushing it away, but it was so fixated on my surfboard for whatever reason, it just kept attacking.”

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Another surfer, 16-year-old Noah Wormhoudt, described his run-in with 841 differently. He said that getting his board hijacked by the sea otter was actually a “pretty cool experience.”

“The otter was shredding,” Wormhoudt said. “Caught a couple of nice waves.”

With 841 still on the loose in the California surf, officials are reminding everyone to give the otter space for both the animal’s benefit and theirs.

“Otters have sharp teeth and jaws strong enough to crush clams,” one official said, noting that if the sea otter bites a human, the state will have no choice but to euthanize it.

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A contractor for the state of Florida captured a large python and discovered her nest with a record number of 111 unhatched eggs, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission.

“The Python Action Team Removing Invasive Constrictors (a.k.a. our PATRIC program) helps remove these invasive, non-native snakes year-round,” wrote the FWC in a July 13 post. “A large invasive Burmese python with a record nest of 111 eggs was removed from the sensitive Everglades ecosystem thanks to PATRIC.”

This record-busting nest comes on the heels of another python record. On July 10, a record 19-foot, 125-pound Burmese Python was caught in the Everglades by a pair of young python hunters, Jake Waleri and Stephen Gauta. This is the longest python ever recorded in the state (watch a video of that hunt here). That snake was also captured in South Florida’s Everglades, in the Big Cypress National Preserve.

This pair of record python catches in South Florida come just as the 2023 Florida Python Challenge gets underway on Aug. 4. The annual competition is a popular event put on by the state that offers up to $30,000 in prize money for persons who catch the most and biggest pythons in Florida.

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FWC says snake removal “helps our native birds, mammals and other reptiles by removing non-native, invasive pythons from the Florida Everglades.”

Burmese pythons negatively impact the Everglades ecosystem by preying upon and competing with native wildlife. The removal of this python and its 111 unhatched eggs helps prevent future negative impacts to our native wildlife, wrote the FWC on its post. Non-native reptiles including Burmese pythons can be dispatched year-round on any private property, and on 32 state managed lands without a hunting license or permits. This is done to control the burgeoning invasive assault of pythons that have invaded South Florida.

Since 2000 FWC says over 18,000 pythons have been removed from South Florida. When the state began offering a paid python removal fee to snake catchers starting in 2017, the number of snakes caught and removed has skyrocketed in number.

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A drake mallard and a turtle were spotted in a swampy standoff on a golf course in Arkansas, which ended with the duck succumbing to its injuries and becoming the turtle’s next meal. The footage, which popular social media brand Nature is Metal shared Thursday, starts with a clip of the duck just barely fighting back against the turtle’s tenacious jaws. But the video eventually cuts to a different clip in which the mallard is clearly dead.

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While NIM doesn’t positively identify the turtle as a snapping turtle, the behavior, size, and shape of the turtle are consistent with the species. It’s tough to tell whether the turtle delivered the first blow to the unsuspecting duck or if it came along to finish the work of another predator. Either way, the turtle had already stripped the duck’s neck of all its feathers before the video began. When the video starts, the turtle has the duck’s neck gripped in its jaws, either by a strip of skin or maybe by the windpipe. The turtle is trying to drag the duck underwater while the duck makes a few final, futile attempts to escape.

The next clip opens with the duck doing a dead man’s float in the murky water. The turtle is visible just beyond the duck, its shell imitating the nearby mess of lily pads. The turtle sneaks its head out of the water, its mouth clamped around a scrap of duck, before dipping back down to feed.

Watch: Grizzly Bear Released from Trap Steals Camera

As the video caption points out, snapping turtles are omnivorous. They eat plant matter as well as spiders, insects, amphibians, birds, and small mammals. Judging by the turtle’s size and the texture of its shell, this was likely a common snapping turtle. Common snapping turtles live in waters across the state, and are smaller than their rarer counterparts, alligator snapping turtles. (Alligator snapping turtles can grow much bigger—upwards of 100 pounds—and exist in southern and eastern Arkansas. Their shells have bumps and ridges reminiscent of an alligator’s scutes, hence their name.)

No matter how events unfolded, the encounter certainly spiced up this guy’s golf game. But as NIM points out, the harsh realities of wildlife have a way of popping up in otherwise tame places.

The post Watch: Turtle Attacks, Kills, and Eats Drake Mallard appeared first on Outdoor Life.

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A photo of a cow moose and her triplets bedded in a Utah woman’s backyard stirred some debate over whether the triplets were moose calves or fawn deer. Few things kick up an Internet dialogue quite like the opportunity to tell strangers they’re wrong. So when Park City, Utah, resident Lesly Levy sent in a photo to local news site Town Lift of a cow moose bedded next to three moose calves in her backyard, a parade of commenters charged in to correct her “misidentification.” Clearly, they argued, due to the size, coloration, and legs that weren’t long or knobby enough, the baby cervids in the photo were deer. 

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Just ask the one commenter who sees “deer and moose co-mingle in my pond (and in nature) all the time,” or the guy whose brother “is an avid deer hunter and said those are deer triplets. Tail and head are dead giveaways!”

But throughout all the debate in the comments, Levy insisted that the young triplets were moose. She was rewarded for sticking to her guns. Utah Division of Wildlife Resources species coordinator Rusty Robinson confirmed in a statement published by Park City news outlet TownLift that the animals are, in fact, moose calves.

Watch: What’s Killing Moose Calves in Alaska?

“I can see how someone might confuse them for deer,” Robinson said. “But the coloration, neonatal facial structure, dark eye rings and snout, inconspicuous tail and long legs are all indicators of a moose calf.”

The tail and head are dead giveaways, indeed.

It’s true that in this particular photo the calves do display the mule deer-like brow, and the one visible tail nub could also be considered muley-esque. But the dark coloration around the throat, belly, and back, plus the fact that those calves are significantly bigger than an average deer fawn, should make the species identification pretty simple.

Other photos and footage of a cow moose with triplets roaming Park City have popped up recently. KSL 5 TV posted a video of the cow attacking a flag on the Jeremy Ranch Golf Course to their Facebook page on July 2.

In the footage, the cow charges the flag after seemingly mistaking it for a threat to her calves. If the photo from Levy’s backyard raised any question about what species the babies were, this footage (and other photos) confirms it: those long legs and short, brown bodies belong indisputably to moose calves.

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Jake Waleri and Stephen Gauta were out snake hunting about 1 a.m. on July 10 in South Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve when they made history. Big Cypress, which is south of Lake Okeechobee, is wild Everglades country. The preserve is jam-packed with invasive Burmese pythons that have devastated the state’s small mammal population in recent years.

Waleri and Gauta, better known as the “Glades Boys,” are veteran python catchers and hunting guides. They’ve captured dozens of snakes, some of them up to 18 feet long. But that night, they encountered their Holy Grail: a record-breaking 19-foot female with a bad attitude.

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“It’s the only snake that scared me enough that I just didn’t know what to do,” Waleri, 22, said in a video recounting the experience. “We spotted it at 1 a.m., and thought it was a 10-footer. Then we realized it was an absolute monster.”

Capturing that monstrous snake was a chaotic mess, Waleri said.

“We tried to pin the head, but that wasn’t working,” the Ohio State University student explained. “So I just jumped on it. It was a real fight.”

Waleri says they tried to pin the snake with a net, and the reptile even struck at him. But eventually they subdued the python and killed it.

Knowing they had a huge python, Waleri and Gauta contacted the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. The environmental advocacy non-profit has been involved in python capture for years to help save the Everglades from the invasive snakes. They spoke to Conservancy biologist Ian Easterling and eventually brought the snake to the Conservancy in Naples for official measurements. The duo also made the decision to donate the python’s body to research.

Easterling measured the snake at 19 feet and 125 pounds. The previous Florida record Burmese python was 18 feet, 9 inches long and weighed 215 pounds. He says the 19-footer is the longest Bumese python ever recovered in Florida, and perhaps anywhere.

“We had a feeling these snakes get this big and now we have clear evidence,” Easterling said. “Her genetic material may prove valuable for an eventual understanding of the founding population of South Florida. We will be collecting measurements and samples that will be distributed to our research collaborators.”

Easterling said the 19-foot snake had likely recently laid a hundred or more eggs and was searching for its next meal.

“They’re getting huge while eating our native wildlife,” Easterling said. “The bonus is that these guys … brought it to us for the official measurements, so we’ll be collecting the genetic information and the diet information and other data.”

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Gauta is seeing more small mammals in areas where they have been removing snakes from the Everglades and believes python hunters are having an impact on the invasive predator snake population.

Watch: Whale Nearly Swallows Two Kayakers

“It’s pretty terrifying that these animals are so destructive to our ecosystem, but knowing we can take monsters [like this snake] out of the Everglades makes you feel good,” Gauta said. “The more people we get involved in these efforts [removing pythons] the more benefits we’ll see.”

The post Watch: Snake Hunters Catch the Longest Python Ever Recorded in Florida appeared first on Outdoor Life.

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