PINECREST, Fla. — A Pinecrest police officer and a Miami-Dade Sheriff’s deputy had their hands full early Thursday morning with a 14-foot Burmese python.
The police department calling the catch a rare traffic stop. Video posted on social media captured the officers handling the dead snake.
Todd Hardwick is a critter catcher. He’s been doing it for three decades.
“Finding pythons now outside of the Everglades is no longer a surprise and it’s the new reality,” said Hardwick. “We’ve got a lot of wildlife in South Florida. Some of it belongs here, some of it doesn’t. You just need to be cautious.”
Pinecrest police said construction workers spotted the snake on US-1 at around 2 a.m.
Hardwick says that was a perfect time.
“There’s not much traffic at two in the morning, things they want to eat are out there,” he said. “Rats are moving, any type possums or raccoons are out there at that time of night, so that was actually the perfect time to find a python.”
And why is a python slithering near a major roadway like US-1? Hardwick says food could be the only motive.
“They’re running out of food in the Everglades,” he said. “The population that counts on rabbits, raccoons and possums are almost at the bottom. There’s nothing left out there to eat, so the pythons are traveling to where the food is and the food is to the west coast, Naples, Marco Island, or east in the Dade, in Broward County and Monroe County.”
Hardwick added that based on how lean the snake looked in the video, it looks like it came from the wild as opposed to being someone’s pet.
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