By Susan Cocking, 12/18/08, Port Mayaca, Jim Watt bumped down a dirt road in his dusty green Dodge pickup on a recent weekday morning, stopping when he spotted a piece of faded carpet next to a canal. He leapt out of the driver's seat, clambered down the steep bank and carefully unfolded the 12-by-8-foot remnant.
Out from the fibery folds slithered a small, colorful red rat snake, which Watt carefully picked up and held out for inspection.
''It's helping clear out my IRS problem,'' he said.
Watt carefully placed the little snake in a white pillowcase, fastened the top, and continued down the road.
Watt, 54, is a professional snake hunter who says he earns between $1,200 and $2,000 per week during fall and winter catching snakes and selling them to reptile distributors. Although snakes are not his primary source of income -- he operates a freshwater turtle farm near Lake Okeechobee -- they are an abiding passion.
''It's an illness,'' he said. ``I've sold snakes since I was 10.''
And Watt can use the extra money just now to fulfill a tax obligation stemming from his second divorce.
What may seem to an observer like a casual drive down a random, rural road peering beneath trash piles is nothing of the sort. The pieces of carpet, tar paper and dried-out wood that Watt was checking that warm December morning were carefully placed attractors -- like buoys installed in the ocean to draw fish, or casitas for lobster. Asked how many he has deployed, Watt says he lost count at 800.
At his next stop, Watt was dismayed to find a section of carpet covered with carpenter ants and devoid of snakes. Retrieving a canister from his truck, he sprayed the fibers lightly with insecticide and put it back where he found it.
Watt explained that snakes don't like carpet infested with ants and wasps because the insects crawl all over them.
Before deploying his carpet attractors, Watt soaks them in his backyard swimming pool to erase odors of glue and chemicals, then dries them in the sun. At the hunting grounds, he arranges them with multiple folds to create thermal layers where cold-blooded reptiles can warm themselves. Black tar paper also is effective.
Watt's main quarries are nonvenomous species: yellow and red rat snakes and scarlet king snakes caught primarily from September through February. While rat snakes might bring a couple bucks apiece, the more prized scarlet kings often sell for $2.50 per inch -- about $60 for a full-grown snake. If Watt really needs cash, he catches nonvenomous water snakes at night.
While the hunter says he loves looking for eastern diamondback rattlesnakes -- a highly venomous reptile common in South Florida -- he doesn't like to sell them because the primary buyers are reptile shows.
''I don't want them tortured. That's just cruel,'' he said.
At one of his carpet 'sets' near a watery ditch, Watt was rewarded with a four-foot red rat snake -- the largest of 10 he caught that morning. Also wrapped inside the carpet was the shed skin of an eastern indigo snake -- designated a threatened species under federal law.
Watt is unhappy that the local population of indigos -- a large, blue-black, nonvenomous species that reptile enthusiasts often describe as ''charismatic'' -- may be imperiled by the same federal government that purports to protect them. Several large projects under the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP, call for flooding and bulldozing the animals' habitat around and south of Lake Okeechobee. Watt and other snake hunters believe the indigos ought to be relocated or privately bred -- not allowed to die in the name of ecosystem restoration.
''If you're going to drain the pond, you might want to get the fish out of it,'' he said, invoking a metaphor.
At home, Watt keeps several venomous and nonvenomous snakes as pets in cages and glass cases in a locked building on his property -- including tree vipers from Indonesia and a 7 ∏-foot-long eastern diamondback. He has state licenses to keep and sell them, plus a $1 million liability insurance policy for hunting on private land. He says he hasn't been bitten since the 1980s.
''I'm careful,'' he said. ``I'm hypersensitive to the venom. I almost died last time.''
Watt may be part of a disappearing breed of professional snake hunters, according to friend and colleague Kevin Enge of Gainesville, a herpetologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.
''There's a lot of recreational snake hunters,'' Enge said. ``As far as people making a living off of it -- not too many. There's a lot more captive breeding going on so a lot more of the demand for snakes is met through captive breeding.''
Although Watt claims only a ninth-grade education, Enge respects his knowledge and abilities.
''He's got it down to a science,'' Enge said of Watt. ``He's the best at what he does. He's not real book-smart, but he really knows what he's doing. What he's doing is a sustainable harvest. He's been a good source of information about what's going on down in South Florida.''
Tue 6 Jan - 4:01