Florida sells itself in postcard-worthy pictures: waves lapping over sand, beach umbrellas lined up in military precision, sunset cocktails sweating on tiki bars.
Then there’s Mike Kimmel’s version of Florida.
Kimmel—better known as “Trapper Mike” or the “Python Cowboy”—is a Martin County outdoorsman who has built a following by doing what many Floridians avoid: walking into swamps, catching pythons, tracking wild hogs, hunting iguanas, wrangling gators, and more. Along the way, his viral videos—including a wrestling match with a 17-foot python whose bite pierced an artery in Kimmel’s arm—and appearances on TV’s Swamp People transformed him from a working trapper into one of Florida’s most recognizable wildlife personalities.
But fame was never the goal for Kimmel. “I just wanted to hunt and help our ecosystem for a living,” he says. “I didn’t plan to put social media into it.” That all changed when a guest on one of Kimmel’s hunts filmed him rescuing a gator from a python and posted the clip online. The video became an internet sensation, eventually catching the attention of FloGrown’s Josh Stuller, who pushed Kimmel toward social media. When Kimmel resisted, Stuller created an Instagram account on his behalf. “He gave me the login information and said, ‘Start using it. It’ll change your life,’” Kimmel recalls. “And it has.”
Long before the cameras, though, Kimmel was just a kid fascinated by reptiles. That fascination led him to volunteer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), where he worked for five years, until he left over a difference of opinion. Kimmel believes that dogs should be central to hunting invasive-species—a practice the FWC doesn’t support. Instead of relying solely on visual searches and his own knowledge about where pythons hide, Kimmel has spent years training Uzi, Moose, and the rest of his 20-deep canine hunting team to locate snakes and their nests using their sense of smell.
It may not be a challenge to find pythons on back roads or levees. But in the swamp, it’s a different story. “That’s the important place to hunt them,” he says. “That’s where they’re breeding, laying nests, and eating our native wildlife.” Without dogs, Kimmel says, hunters can spend hours searching and still miss a snake. A dog can cover the same ground in minutes. “That nose is a lot more reliable than my eyes,” he explains. The results speak for themselves. “I was the first person in the python program to find a nest,” Kimmel says. That’s
before I was using dogs. Now, we’ll find 30 or more nests in a season.”
In 2017, Kimmel launched Martin County Trapping and Removals. His audience grew, the catches got bigger, and eventually so did the mythology of the Python Cowboy. Today, travelers seek him out to book guided hunts—sometimes a year in advance—to chase invasive species like pythons, hogs, iguanas, snakeheads, clown knifefish, and armored plecos.
Call it eco-adventure. Call it adrenaline tourism. Whatever the label, Kimmel isn’t taking folks on a pleasure cruise. Instead, he says, he’s offering an understanding of a fragile ecology that’s overrun with invasive species—and removing those species while he’s at it.
Burmese pythons, Kimmel says, are the enemy number one on the to-be-removed list. Native to Southeast Asia, pythons were likely introduced to Florida through the exotic pet trade. The snakes—which can grow to 20 feet long or more—established themselves in the Everglades, all but decimating the population of native mammals like otters, raccoons, opossums, rabbits, and more. Florida has spent years expanding removal efforts, including its annual Python Challenge (which Kimmel won in 2020).
Even for experienced hunters like Kimmel, finding a python in the wild is equal parts skill, luck, and obsession. For newcomers, it feels like entering another world as you climb aboard Kimmel’s custom Prodigy boat and push into the Everglades. The soundtrack? Insects, whippoorwills, distant splashes, and the hum of a motor cutting slowly through dark waters.
You glide through a channel, headed toward an island tucked into wetlands. As darkness falls, the Everglades turns black. Moonflowers bloom. Sawgrass whispers in the breeze. Gator eyeshines flash by the dozens. “A lot of folks are surprised at how beautiful the swamp is at night,” Kimmel says. “People think of it as bugs, heat, and muddy water. But it’s different than that.”
When the bow of Kimmel’s boat makes contact with land, you scramble out and switch your headlamp on. Each direction is filled with dense vegetation and the uneasy feeling that something large could be hidden almost anywhere. Kimmel’s dogs race past you, moving through palmettos, vines, and scrub. You try to keep up. You watch your back for alligators. You watch your step for water moccasins.
It’s a silent meditation in swallowing fear and embracing adventure—until barking breaks your concentration. You follow the sound to converge on a spot where a 12-foot-long python curls up under a sawgrass thicket. Kimmel calls off the dogs, flattens the brush, and grabs the snake’s tail—leaving most of its body on the ground. “Letting her lay there like that calms her down,” he explains. You’re not sure you agree. But before you can say so, Kimmel snatches the snake’s head. “You want to grab as close to the fat part of her head as you can so she doesn’t get a chunk of you,” he says. The snake bites at the air. You take pictures before Kimmel deposits the snake into a bag that he’ll carry back to the boat. Later, he’ll euthanize the python with a single .22-caliber bullet to the head. “It’s not their fault that they’re out here,” he says. “We have to respect that and give them a clean death.”
What kind of people choose to spend their vacation near the biting end of a python? Kimmel reckons that his hunts tap into a travel trend: people increasingly want stories, not souvenirs. “They want to get out of their comfort zone and do something new,” Kimmel explains. “They need a little excitement in their lives.”
Not everyone comes to Kimmel’s tours with snake experience. Some simply come because they are curious—or looking for the kind of adventure they can’t find at home. “I get people from all walks of life and from all over the world,” Kimmel says. “I’ve had newbies who don’t want to kill anything, but they want to get involved in an adventure that has a positive impact on the ecosystem. I’ve had avid hunters and professional guides who’ve never hunted an iguana or a python and they’re looking to add that to their list.”
Recent hunt guests Jerry Stange and his adult daughter Sammi Brooks of St. Michael, Minnesota, fall somewhere in the middle. Stange has spent a lifetime hunting snakes. After watching python hunts on Swamp People, a Google search for an experienced guide led him to Kimmel. “He’s my guy,” Stange says. “I was looking for adventure and quality and safety. And he has it all.”
Stange’s first trip with Kimmel was meant to be solo; he worried the outing might be too dangerous for Brooks (who shares her father’s fascination with all things that slither). When Brooks settled the issue by buying herself a plane ticket, Stange acquiesced. The pair set out for their debut hunt with Kimmel in 2025 and returned again
this year, turning python season into a father-daughter tradition (with a 2027 hunt already on the books).
Danger is part of the draw, say both Stange and Brooks, but it’s not the whole story. “There’s a sense of respect—both for the animal you’re handling, and then the ecosystem you’re preserving,” Brooks says. “Plus, there are people who can’t—or won’t—do this,” she says. “And you get to have that feeling of: ‘But I just did this.’”
Stange agrees, and says sharing the adventure with Brooks has taken his snake-hunting obsession to the next level. “I’ve been bitten by almost every non-venomous snake there is,” he admits (including a rattlesnake bite that took four rounds of anti-venom and two days in the ICU to cure). “If it takes a snakebite to make memories that my daughter and I will remember for the rest of our lives… well, then bite me all you want.”
For Kimmel, his work is not measured only in memories made or tours booked—or even in the number of pythons removed. Increasingly, he says, it is measured in what returns.
“We’re starting to see some of our native wildlife return in the areas where I hunt,” he says. He points to a hole where his favorite dog, Otto, once located a python nest below ground. The nest was excavated and the eggs removed. Two years later, Kimmel returned to find an otter using the same hole as a shelter. “It’s a huge indicator that we’re on the right track,” he says proudly.
For Floridians who live where other people vacation, it can be tempting to define adventure by passport stamps, far-off destinations, and bucket-list flights. But some journeys are hiding just a few hours down the road. No customs line required. Just bug spray. Maybe boots. Definitely a headlamp. And a willingness to step into the version of Florida that still bites back.
That may be the real draw of a Python Cowboy hunt. Not the photos you’ll post, not the adrenaline rush you’ll feel, not even the stories you’ll tell after you’ve traded mud-caked boots for flip-flops. It is the reminder that Florida still has wild edges—the kind that don’t fit neatly on a postcard.
“People think of Florida as beaches, Disney, Miami. For me, that’s not Florida,” Kimmel says. “The best way I know to get people to value the real Florida is to get them out here and show them what we’re trying to protect.”
That’s why somewhere tonight, while most of the state sleeps, Kimmel is likely doing what he has always done—setting out to hunt, dogs awaiting his command, in search of the next sign of a snake.
For visitors, it’s the adventure of a lifetime. For Kimmel, it’s just another Saturday in what’s left of the real Florida.For travelers chasing something wilder than beaches and boat drinks, a hunt with Mike Kimmel (aka the Python Cowboy) offers a chance to explore Florida’s untamed edges
Facebook Comments