By day, finance experts – by night, python hunters

Tom Uhler

All those old-timers were right: You can’t judge a book by its cover. That rather overused bromide becomes a startling new truth in a couple of moneymen, Geoff Roepstorff and Tom Uhler.

Both Sanibel residents, when they get up in the morning, Roepstorff is CEO of Edison National Bank with its Bank of the Islands offices, and Uhler is a financial consultant and partner in Uhler Vertich White Advisors, who also sits as vice chairman of the board of the Southwest Florida Symphony Orchestra.

At day’s end, however, the two friends regularly focus on the 18s — not 18-hole golf courses for which Florida ranks number one among the 50 states, but the other, more disturbing 18s.

Florida also ranks number one in invasive Burmese pythons, now three-decade inhabitants of an Everglades ecosystem roughly 5,000 years old. Night-hunting apex predators, they can become 200-pound torpedoes of muscle and ambition as long as 18 feet, just like they do in Burma.

“Geoff has been with our program as a licensed contractor since day one (in 2017), and before that he was a University of Florida volunteer. He and his wife, Robbie, were involved with early python challenges beginning in 2013. They’re bankers by day, but absolute champions by night. The suits come off, the field clothes go on, and out into the night they go,” explains Mike Kirkland, the senior invasive species wildlife biologist of the South Florida Water Management District, principle developer and manager of the district’s python elimination program.

Geoff Roepstorff COURTESY PHOTOS

And Uhler? He’s just a volunteer and close friend of Roepstorff, known for his sharp-eyed focus. You couldn’t tell it by looking at either one of them.

“My theory is pythons only want two things: to eat when they get hungry, and sex,” notes Uhler, who may be a moneyman but who also holds an undergraduate degree in biology.

Burmese pythons are very good at both, it seems. With numbers estimated between 100,000 and 300,000 by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, females can lay between

12 and 48 eggs in the spring. The snakes have now reduced the fur-bearing mammal population in Everglades National Park by 95 percent, studies have shown — a tragic depletion and loss of creatures like marsh rabbits, opossums, raccoons, otters, foxes, bobcats and many more. They kill and eat deer and have taken on alligators, and they’ve mostly eradicated the primary food sources of larger predators like panthers and alligators.

Among the various programs aimed at greatly reducing their number, the most successful so far is Kirkland’s just-get-out-and-do-it model that kicked off in 2017. It relies on 100 licensed hunters under contract — 50 managed in a program by the FWC, and 50 by Kirkland and the South Florida Water Management District.

With Uhler riding shotgun but minus the shotgun, the two spot snakes on or near the levee roads, and Roepstorff captures them by hand — not a task for the faint of heart or people who have to get seven or eight hours of sleep every night.

In about 15 trips into the field, including one rainy night earlier in the summer when Uhler spotted two and Roepstorff apprehended both, Uhler has accounted for 10 snakes.

Roepstorff has removed many more over time. He’s also been bitten five times in his years as a hunter, which was never his plan.

Hunting with Uhler, he knows his partner will yell “PYTHON!” if he spots one, “then immediately he’ll tell me how big,” he says.

Then the fun begins, or the battle.

Uhler tries to stay out of it, in part because he has only one leg, and nimble agility is often called for. And in part because he’s not a young man — not that he offers that information until a reporter asks.

At 81, he’s a decade older than his mere boy of a companion, 71-year-old Roepstorff.

“You grab them where you can,” says Roepstorff. “The last couple we caught, I was in water up to my knees. I try to catch them behind the head, because you’re controlling a lot.”

But if you get them by the tail, reports Uhler, “they’re all fast-twitch fiber and powerful as heck, so you dance around for about 2 minutes.” And the snake tries to sink its long teeth into you until it grows exhausted.

Sometimes it wraps itself around your legs, admits Roepstorff, “but they can’t hurt your legs.” You don’t want them wrapping themselves around your neck, and “you have to know what you’re doing,” he adds matter-of-factly.

Just as unpleasantly, “they defecate on you,” reports Roepstorff.

“It really smells bad,” acknowledges Uhler.

“They call it ‘the python hunters’ perfume,’” adds Roepstorff.

Both men are longtime environmental advocates and temperamental go-getters, so the notion of going after an invasive critter that altered the face of Everglades National Park, even one that impolite, seemed natural.

To date, says Kirkland, hunters have removed about 14,000 pythons from the Everglades, “making them the most successful cost-effective removal strategy in our history.”

Although anybody can go hunt pythons, only 50 are licensed and contracted — more would likely not produce a lot more pythons, although many want the chance.

“We get about 100 applications a week from all over the world,” Kirkland said.

Contracted hunters are given keys to open gates on the sometimes remote and wild levees or roads in Everglades National Park, and they have the run of the place, although they’re carefully tracked when they hunt.

The program and its hunters cover 11 counties of unique, water-logged terrain, unlike anything else in North America or the world.

But it’s been changed.

“It is so beautiful out there at night in the middle of the Everglades — maybe there’s a moon, maybe not, but there are no biting insects. The pythons have extricated all the mammals, so the bugs have nothing to feed on. Goeff has caught them eating egrets,” says Uhler.

“I’ve been out about 15 times and I’ve never seen a rabbit, a possum or a cat — we’ve seen a couple of very large wild hogs, and a couple of deer, that’s about it.”

As for Roepstorff, “What draws me out there is, they’re doing so much damage. Every python we catch, we say, this one’s not getting to Sanibel.” ¦

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