Hunter Catches Five Pythons Measuring Up To 9ft In Single Day [Video]

A python hunter caught five snakes on the same day from a national park in South Florida.

Mike Kimmel, 31, a licensed python hunter for the South Florida Water Management District, posted a video of it on his YouTube channel "Python Cowboy" on Dec. 27.

“The weather was perfect and I had a great day leaving with 5 pythons, 3 of which I caught within 10 ft of each other all at once!” he said.

He was hunting in the Big Cypress National Preserve in his truck when Kimmel spotted two pythons resting next to each other in a place obscured by spiky grass. Kimmel soon found a third one, which was lurking about 10 feet away.

Kimmel said he did not expect to see three pythons back to back and was carrying only one bag. He said he therefore made the capture “a little bit more tricky.” Kimmel carefully put each snake in his bag. The first one was a Burmese python which bit him on his right wrist but he carried on searching for more of them.

“Then I got in the truck and drove maybe 50 feet and there was another python right there,” he said. Kimmel ended up catching five pythons in a single day among which the largest one measured up to 9 feet.

In September, the South Florida Water Management District had boosted the budget of a python program to $750,000 from $225,000 annually. Kimmel said the hunters deployed under the program – meant to restore Florida Everglades’ ecosystem by eliminating pythons that became top predators there – are making big contributions to it. Ever since the program began in March 2017, at least 2,727 pythons were reportedly captured by the hunters.