You have the Florida Legislature up here in the state capital pondering how to spend $700 million on restoration ...
You have Burmese pythons down there in South Florida devouring the wildlife in Everglades National Park at an alarming rate.
Isn't anybody making the connection?
Maybe in the nick of time independent filmmaker Oscar Corral is doing just that.
The Miami native and former award-winning Herald reporter debuted his startling, 58-minute documentary, "Exotic Invaders: Pythons in the Everglades," and it was no accident he staged the event in Tallahassee, on the second day of the legislative session.
The film is a must-see for every member of the Florida Legislature.
It will be shown across the nation on PBS in May.
Corral called it "impact journalism." He even spent time at the Capitol before the screening, talking with the people who could make a difference. The idea was -- get policymakers interested in doing something about the pythons and other killer exotic animals before every native creature in the Everglades is gone.
"It's important that the state of Florida pay attention to this issue, because they are spending billions of dollars to restore the Everglades to its original state with water flow, but if they're spending billions to restore the Everglades ... but they're letting invasive species run wild, then that investment is in jeopardy and they need to include this part of the puzzle in the restoration," Corral told an audience of about 200 at theChallenger Learning Center IMAX.
The Everglades needs a champion. A legislator, a congressman, a senator. Our governor. Probably all of the above.
In a 2012 study, researchers who counted Everglades National Park mammals found that 99 percent of raccoons have disappeared since 2000, when pythons became fully established. Marsh rabbits and foxes completely vanished.Over a decade ending in 2009, federal and state agencies spent $100 million just on the recovery of wood storks in the national park, a staple of the pythons diet.
These snakes swallow deer whole. They eat alligators. Now they've found their way into one of the few remaining sanctuaries for American crocodiles.
Corral and the experts on invasive species he brought with him from Florida Fish and Wildlifeand Audubon Florida agreed -- it's now or never, the Everglades do need a champion. So did the handful of lawmakers who attended, including Rep. Frank Artiles, R-Miami.
Artiles, who sat up front with the panel, actually knows something about the problem. He has killed a python in the national park and has its skin mounted on his wall in the House office building.
"These aren't animals you can just capture and move somewhere else," he said. "Wherever they go they will eat animals. They swallow their prey whole. They must be hunted and killed."
Despite their overwhelming numbers, pythons are extremely hard to find. Every hunter in the film made that perfectly obvious. Pythons blend. They're right at your feet but good at staying hidden. They require hunters -- real swampland hunters -- to find and kill them, and it will be an ongoing task , not something for a few set-aside weeks a year.
And because Everglades National Park is a national park, you can't just go in there and kill the things. The capture of pythons for monetary gain is forbidden in the park. To reverse that would take a change in the rules at the federal level. And not a single person have I been able to find -- not a congressman, not a state official, not an environmentalist, not even billionaire Paul Tudor Jones -- has launched a plan to make the destruction of Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park priority No. 1.
Artiles believes he and other concerned lawmakers could make a case for using a portion of the $700 million Amendment 1 proceeds -- a drop in the bucket portion compared to other projects likely to be funded -- to pay for a python eradication program in Everglades National Park. The Burmese python is an exotic, after all. It is a predatory alien the likes of which our fragile River of Grass hasn't seen in thousands of years. We need a program to bring about extinction, said Artiles, not simply eviction. "The snakes must be destroyed."
What gets me so flustered over this now, after all this time, is the amount of money we've wasted on environmental fixes that weren't, or were halted and reversed, or were studied and restudied to the tune of hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. We can't get that money back now. It's gone.
We need to be allowed into Everglades National Park to hunt and kill Burmese pythons. And we need the money to get the long, hard, slog of a job done.
"I don't think we'll ever get rid of every one," said Corral. "But we could destroy enough to manage the numbers."
True, as one member of the audience pointed out, the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- FEMA -- should do the heavy lifting on the pythons because the pythons wound up inside the park after Hurricane Andrew destroyed their exhibit at the Miami Zoo. But you know it won't.
And, true, the National Park Service should prune its own deadly invasive species. But it won't, either.
This is a job left to Floridians. If we don't do it, no one will.
So, I repeat: We need to be allowed into Everglades National Park to hunt and kill Burmese pythons.We need a recurringly funded, well-managed python eradication program in the park. Just a small amount of Amendment 1 money could do that -- allowing professional swamp hunters to do what they do better than anyone else.Otherwise, all the Everglades restoration in the world won't be saving a precious jewel -- just a slithering swamp.
Who will step up to the plate?
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: NancyLBSmith
