Python hunt fuels fashion, creates new market for Hollywood businessman

Brian Wood grabs an 8-foot Burmese python by the tail, lifts it off the ground and goes for a semi-choke hold — a move in which snake handlers hold the invasive beasts just behind the skull.

He misses by a few inches, which allows the snake to twist to the right and latch onto his hand.

"Heeee, heee, heeee," Wood screams as the snake dangles from his hand.

Wood pulls at the snake, trying to fee himself from the constrictor. The problem with that technique: pythons have curved teeth. Pull the snake and you only make the wounds worse.

"I've been bit," Wood says while his friend and fellow hunter, Leo Sanchez, gives him medical advice.

"Check your hand, it might get a little swollen," Lopez says while gaining control of the snake, "it  depends on the (amount and types of) bacteria (in the snake's mouth)."

Wood, owner of All American Alligator in Hollywood, will eventually have the last laugh, though. The snake will be euthanized, gutted, tagged and sent back to Wood — who will either make the skin into a pair of lavish, $1,000 boots or send it to high-end fashion designers in Europe.

He's been making clothes, jewelry and accessories out of alligator hide for 27 years. Now Wood is trying to create a market for Burmese pythons killed or captured in the historic Everglades.

"We’re trying to help the hunters, help the Everglades and help the situation," Wood says on a recent day at his leather and clothing store. "On the sales end people buy them just because it’s an Everglades snake. They want to help, so it’s kind of a little twist we can use to promote (a python skin industry)."

Burmese pythons have been growing in population and range in South Florida for the past 20 years or so. The snakes eat and compete with endangered and threatened species, and they're considered a top ecological threat.

Native to Asia and now likely a permanent part of South Florida's ecology, these pythons can grow to 20 feet in length and eat prey as large as adult alligators.

They're almost impossible to find in the wild because their skin looks like camouflage clothing. These ambush predators don't move often, which makes spotting them even harder.

Wood started working with python skins in 2010, when the state created a program that allows permitted hunters to remove the snakes from certain preserves and parks.

Now he makes everything from python Chuck Taylor style tennis shoes to purses and full-length pants ($1,800).

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation held the first python hunt in 2013, with 1,600 hunters killing just 68 snakes.

That hunt drew worldwide attention, with media from across the country, Canada, Europe and Australia following people toting everything from rifles, to machetes, paint rollers and even cordless electric screw drivers ("you just scramble their brains around a little bit and that's it," a hunter said to The News-Press in 2013).

Florida also took a public image pummeling in editorial cartoons, columns and letters to the editor — most of which depicted the hunt as a way to gather slack-jawed, machete-wielding rednecks in what looked like a traveling Bass Pro Shops traveling circus.

Hunts were not held in 2014 or 2015.

This year the hunt is back, and Wood's team (All American Alligators) is taking part. In previous year's he'd buy skins from hunters, as he has done with alligators for more than 20 years. And Wood is an active hunter in the 2016 Florida Python Challenge, which is about slaying one of the most damaging invasive species living in the Sunshine State.

"A lot of people like everything that revolves around it," says son Jake Wood, a former Florida Gulf Coast University student who is now working for the family business. "It's protecting the Everglades, and that's essentially why (the end product) exists."

The Woods rely heavily on Leo Sanchez, a seasoned hunter who lays claim to about 70 giant constrictors.

"A 12-footer bit me in the chest once," Sanchez says while showing The News-Press photos of a python attached to his right pectoral muscle. Helpers pulled at the snake, and Sanchez's skin went with it — looking like some sort of circus torture display. "It was the best day of my life."

Sanchez isn't a blood-thirsty man intent on killing. Rather, he loves the snakes, to the point that he refused to kill them.

"It’s the same rush," he says. "It doesn’t change. I’m like a kid in a candy store with these snakes."

While most hunters carry machetes, guns and big sticks, Sanchez uses his hands to subdue the snakes. His only weapon is a bright headlamp, which he uses to find and catch these animals.

"I’m a reptile lover and I’m never going to get to travel to Asia to put my hands on these," says Lopez, his hands visible shaking from the adrenaline rush. "So I come to the Everglades (to catch them) and at the same time I’m helping the get rid of these invasive (species), helping the ecosystem try to bring the native animal back – give them at least a fighting chance."

Wood brought two snakes to his shop earlier in the day, pulling them from white plastic bags packed in a blue cooler.

He opened one bag, and a gutted 7-foot python plops onto his lowered tailgate.

“They typically leave the head on unless it was blown off,” he said while unraveling the dead snake.

Captured pythons first go to the University of Florida, where scientists record the location the snake was killed, the length and weight as well as the sex and stomach contents.

From there Wood skins the snakes and sends the skins to a tannery in Sebring, where chemicals are applied to the skin to make it both durable and supple.

Several months later (tanning is a long process) the skins come back to Wood's shop, where he takes lengths of reptile skins and shapes them into complicated forms — like that of a motorcycle seat.

"Sometimes we’ll make something for ourselves and other times we’ll process them for the hunters and (make them) purses, wallets, whatever the person wants to make from their own snake," Wood says.

Connect with this reporter: ChadGillisNP on Twitter.