What parent doesn’t worry — even a little bit — when their just-graduated college kid heads to South Florida for a vacation with a bunch of his buddies?
But Andrew Sokolowski isn’t much of a drinker. And what he was most interested in chasing doesn’t hang out in bars or like to flirt.
“Python hunting has to be done at night,” said his father, Mark Sokolowski, who lives in Arlington Heights. “So you’re going to be up all night. You get home and all the bars are closed.”
Andrew Sokolowski, 22, is now destined to become something of a legend in Florida, after he and his buddies wrangled a 19-foot-long Burmese python — the longest ever captured in that state, according to the Naples-based Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
“It’s so incredible that an animal like this exists and that I’m standing maybe six inches away from it,” said Andrew Sokolowski, who was back in Arlington Heights this week and applying to law schools after graduating in the spring from The Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in finance.
Sokolowski isn’t a professional snake wrangler. In fact, the largest serpent he’d seen in the wild until recently was a garter snake — before he headed to Florida on July 4. A college friend, Jake Waleri, lives in Florida and had been hunting pythons, an invasive species, for the past three years. Waleri invited Sokolowski and some other friends to join him on a hunt.
As an invasive species, the pythons “compete with native wildlife for food, which includes mammals, birds, and other reptiles,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey. “Severe mammal declines in Everglades National Park have been linked to Burmese pythons.”
The python’s camouflage is so effective that hunters typically search for the snakes at night with high-powered flashlights.
“I was more worried about the gators or the water moccasins or coral snakes or copperheads,” said his father, who previously lived in South Florida. “I’m thrilled for him.”
Sokolowski and his buddies saw plenty of other snakes before they encountered the behemoth python on July 9 while driving along U.S. 41, which cuts through the swampy flatlands of the Big Cyprus National Preserve.
“We look up from the back of the truck bed, and there’s this enormous speed bump in the middle of the road. We instantly knew this was a giant python,” Sokolowski said.
What follows, judging by the cellphone videos, is a terrifying — somewhat comical — attempt to capture a snake that definitely doesn’t want to be caught.
“You have to grab it right behind the neck and try and pin its neck,” Sokolowski said. “When it comes to a 19-foot snake, it’s very, very hard to get a good control on it.”
The video shows the snake, jaws spread, lunging at its would-be captors, while slithering hither and thither.
“She tried striking at Jake and biting him. She just missed and that put us at a close enough range that he was able to quickly go down and grab her,” Sokolowski said.
In their hurry to yank the snake out of the road to avoid a fast-approaching car, the hunters broke the creature’s neck, Sokolowski said.
The hunters loaded the snake into the back of the truck and brought it to the conservancy, where it was measured at 19 feet — three inches longer than the previous record, according to the conservancy website.