ALLIGATOR RON BERGERON, one of Florida's leading conservationists, steps out of his glinting gold-and-black Hummer. TV reporters wait below on the levee of the C-4 canal, which drains water from the Everglades toward Biscayne Bay. In snakeskin boots and a rodeo belt, he surveys the cameras. The right media shot is at the water's edge, with the marshland spreading away beyond. Behind him, water roars through a flood-control structure. Two handlers hold a Burmese python in a snake bag.

Bergeron flashes a Rooseveltian smile. His land-moving company has been responsible for much of south Florida's development and has made him rich along the way, but now his primary job is to be photographed taking part in environmentally friendly endeavors. "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to the 2016 Python Challenge!" he says.

A century ago, south Florida was an unusable wetland, well known to the cavalry-hunted Seminole tribe but described by one colonially minded explorer to be "as much unknown to the white man as the heart of Africa," until an ambitious federal canal plan drained it for agriculture and wealthy settlers.

Scott McIntyre

Now we've wrung it into paradise. The swamps are sucked dry, the roads are paved, oranges are naturalized, retired Americans have found their fountains of youth, and the remainder of the Glades have become a vast melting pot of immigrant life: African crocodiles, Thai catfish, Malagasy chameleons, Indonesian gecko, Australian melaleuca, Cuban tree frog, Brazilian peppertree, Cuban anole, Mayan cichlid, Argentine tegu, Indian java plum, Kenyan veiled chameleon, and Pakistani walking catfish have—thanks to humans—all invaded and nestled in.

Alligator Ron's Hummer.

The Burmese python has been in the Everglades for only a few decades. We blame its escape to the wild on lazy pet owners and on Hurricane Andrew, which splintered a breeding center in 1992. Either way, the Burmese is now an unstoppable predator, entrenched in the Everglades ecosystem. Small mammals—easy prey—increasingly are no longer. No one is sure how many pythons are out there, but Alligator Ron tells an anecdote about how he once stepped on one in the wild. The pythons aren't the biggest threat to the Everglades' integrity, but the Burmese is the surrogate for an uncountable number of factors decimating the Everglades. They've gone viral for eating alligators. In 2009, a pet Burmese strangled a two-year-old in central Florida.

Now we have python hunts.

"I know every square inch of this, because I grew up here." Bergeron points across the marshland that emptied into the skyline. To the other direction is Fort Lauderdale, around which his company built the highways. "You can drop me anywhere out there, and I can find my way back. This is my home." An empty water bottle lies in the weeds at his feet.

SOUTH FLORIDA IS A BOWL that dips gently toward Florida Bay, sending its silt and promise southward, where it is deposited into the seaside ring of mangrove nets and rots in the root, decaying in layer upon layer. And in the muck, crawlers, swimmers, waders, and land developers teem.

The Everglades, both the national park and its less-protected but equally sensitive surroundings, are a conservation disaster, championed as a benchmark for restoration but in truth more like a 4,000-square-mile diorama held in place by controlled water flow. A massive restoration program, launched in 2000, was spearheaded by those with interests contradictory to actual preservation, in particular a developer-turned-politician named Jeb Bush. Invasive species run amok; oil interests are closing in; canals drain water away; sugar plantations pollute the water that remains. Like so much of the American wild, it's less a testimony to nature than to the Army Corps of Engineers. Now Florida is hoping to mitigate one of its disasters in the same way it caused so many: by marketing to tourists.

Alligator Ron. Alligator Ron.

This is the second year the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Bergeron's government employer, has held its month-long python hunt, dangling $16,500 in front of a thousand bounty hunters who, following a $25 entry fee and an online slideshow, are invited to kill or capture as many Burmese pythons as they can find in a span of one month. Professional snake hunters and amateurs are divided into separate prize categories to encourage maximum participation. A Discovery production crew arrives to shoot a serpent-catchin' thriller. Snakes can be captured alive or dead, and can be dispatched with bolt guns, actual guns, or, of course, machetes. There is no hope of hunters putting a significant dent in the Burmese python population—68 captured in 2013, 102 this year—so ostensibly the Challenge is about the vague notion of invasive-species awareness.

Registrants from across the country have readied for the January starting date. It's not every day you get to hunt an apex predator. The last big hunt in this part of the state, targeting black bears in 2015, was closed after two days after what amounted to a slaughter.

The python hunt will inevitably fail to be as fruitful. At best, more pythons being captured would just prove that the species has more firmly embedded itself in the wild. But it will inevitably, mystifyingly, be celebrated as a success. Florida has never been particularly farsighted on conservation.

WILL NACE'S ARM, COVERED IN SCARS, disappears into a camo jacket. The moon shines through the sparse slash pines onto the rocky earth below. He and his sister Suzi, an insurance worker from Fort Lauderdale with a vulture tattoo visible underneath her blonde hair, drive into the scrub with flashlights and snake hooks. Both are avid snake owners. Will, 6' 9", keeps a pet Burm at his place of employment, the Everglades Alligator Farm, where tourists come to watch him wrestle alligators.

Will Nace and his pet Burmese python. Scott McIntyre

"They've got a python table set up," Will says as they arrive in the Southern Glades. Cars of competitor hunters mill on the side of the road, and a man in uniform sits at a table.

"Do we need to register?" Suzi asks.

"Nah." Will keeps driving. They hadn't read the competition guidelines that carefully; they are more interested in reptiles than registration tables.

Exotic-pet laws are exceptionally strict in Florida, since almost anything can escape and thrive there. Laws on pet Burms have tightened considerably in recent years—the only people who have them now are those with permits who were grandfathered in to the current restrictions. And though activists might say the act of keeping a zoo or taming an exotic pet is taking away the natural dignity and freedom of its wildness, that seemed like a weak case to Will and Suzi; humans have done the same to wolves, cats, boars, and bulls for centuries. The pythons are just symptomatic of development; and, according to enthusiasts, punishing responsible pet owners is akin to punishing hunters for gun murders.

"Usually I hunt snakes barefoot," Will says, stepping around a sinkhole as night falls. He is intending to capture one with his bare hands.

On winter nights the pythons retreat to hidden, warm places and become hay-colored needles in a haystack. The thing to do is to poke through wet sinkholes and in palmetto stands, where leaves fall, compost, and create heat. The water that trickles down the state erodes the soft, deforested limestone, creating porous solution holes of dissected rock, perfect for finding snakes in. What they lack in probability, Will and Suzi make up for in knowledge.

In 2013, while doing a show for tourists, Will's arm got caught in a 900-pound alligator's mouth. He was national novelty news for a few days. In response to the determining insurance-coverage question—Would you ever get back in a cage with an alligator?—Will said yes. Coverage denied.

Every weekend he drives to his employer, just south of Homestead, and sticks his head in a gator's mouth while a small audience claps. He'll tell you that he likes to educate people on what they're afraid of. More probably, some people just like sticking their heads in alligators' mouths. It's somewhere between a respect for the wild and a joyride—a quintessentially Floridian trait.

Only a few years ago, he was a DJ in Fort Lauderdale, walking into clubs, buying bottles, and handing shots to girls, bouncers, and bartenders. "But you get tired of that," he says. He was offered the gator-wrestling gig in Homestead. Now he is a snake man, owner of a truck with 36" rims, and a wad of chewing tobacco at hand. In the moonlight, he begins to stray a couple hundred yards from Suzi, searching through sinkholes with his headlamp.

In hunting, the scale of one's focus shifts. The bushes become the trees, the ceiling of where your prey might be hiding. The grasses, long dead, lie in lattice, a foot from the earth, thatching a sheeted crawlway for those who want to stay hidden. There are whole inches that can't be seen. You crouch. Every reed, every rock, every wart of marled earth looks like a python.

Will snaps up suddenly. He finds himself alone. The world pours back into itself. He whoops, and he makes his way back toward Suzi. "Nothing?" he asks.

"Nothing."

Nace wrestles alligators for a living. Scott McIntyre

A GOLD MORNING SUN BEAMS as Mark Jacim, a 50-year-old Tampa high school teacher, takes a deep whiff of fresh air through the SUV window. "It's just beautiful out here!" he exclaims.

Haley Hanson, his 22-year-old former student, sits shotgun, singing along to Van Morrison. She is sandy-haired, with freshly painted pink nails, sunglasses that envelop her face, and a state-issued license to remove exotic animals from the wild, which she earned as a biology undergraduate. Not your typical swamp rat.

Haley Hanson. Scott McIntyre

"National parks in general are the greatest things on earth," Mark says. "The thing about nature is that you never know what's going to happen."

"It's a beautiful place," Haley agrees.

The two had driven out past Homestead, past the fruit trees, past the quarantined fruit-fly fields, the royal-palm-lined plant nurseries, and the avocado trees, into Frog Pond Wildlife Management Area. They seek any excuse to take the five-hour trip to the Glades. Beauty is beauty. In Florida, beauty always shrinks.

Haley changes into hiking boots. Her toenails match her fingers. Mark keeps his eyes peeled.

"Wow! Look at that! Isn't that amazing!" says Mark, stopping the car. A flock of ibis takes off from a field adjacent to the road. "Boy, I hope we see some snakes," he says. Like most participants, they aren't exactly snake-hunting pros and, upon finding one, probably wouldn't know what to do with it. They are mostly here, as Floridian ethos goes, because they can be.

Snake hooks. Scott McIntyre

Later, Mark spots a game trail alongside a small canal and stops the car. He and Haley get out. The wind howls through a rusted culvert covered in cobwebs and rips through the eight-foot grasses that tower over the path. A stork rolls about in the currents above. Haley holds on to a DIY snake hook, shaped like a long question mark, that she rigged from a nine-iron, a paint roller, and a belt grinder. Mark toys with a noose pole she made from PVC and corrugated cable.

Mark drives along the high, wide-open C-111 levee, scanning the ground, a strategy known as roadrunning. You can cover more ground that way. Plus, in thick grasses, pythons are nearly impossible to find; much easier to wait for one to emerge. But the high winds are bad for hunting, chilling the air and forcing life into low cover. "I could sure go for some stagnation," Mark says, wind blasting his face.

Up ahead, people. On high ground stands a thin, energetic man, and they stop to talk. Leo Sanchez, a professional snake hunter from Miami, bounds about, explaining his hunting technique. Mark and Haley can use the help. "Every snake out here has a purpose except these pythons," he says. "My thing is I touch them, I feel them, I love them, and I respect them. It's not their fault. I never kill them. Never. Sometimes I feel a little cuckoo." He dodges. "I grab 'em by the tail."

Leo pauses a moment then ricochets away, hops across a stream, and disappears into a thick wall of trees, the only person who seems to understand the full purposelessness of man's interference here.

Mark and Haley drive on and pull up on Aerojet Road past a sign riddled with bullet holes that reads "Discharge of Firearms Prohibited." They get out. Mark breathes the fresh air. Cocoplums line the abandoned road and satinleafs reach overhead, making a green-and-copper tunnel that stretches to the horizon. Like an empty vein. The sun falls.

Mark Jacim. Scott McIntyre

The two head down Aerojet to look for a python, a couple of nature lovers in a conservation farce. Haley puts a camo hat on her head. "Here, is this better?"

"There you go," Mark says. "Now you blend right in."

"I think people get a picture of what snake hunters are supposed to look like," she says. "Especially with all the TV shows with all the crazies."

THE PINK THUMBPRINT OF SUNRISE presses into the sky. Jeanette Meneses stares down Aerojet Road through the sight of her friend's assault rifle. No bullets; just for vision. The cracked transport road leads miles south from Homestead to a crumbling missile silo, abandoned by NASA a half-century ago. Weeds have reclaimed the pavement. Jeanette and her friends Mike Mann and Antoine James, all Homestead locals, stand around their Expedition, equally decked out in camo, flush with guns and knives. They are devout Jehovah's Witnesses, and they met through their faith. Together they call themselves the Dukes of Florida, self-described rednecks.

Jeanette Meneses' shotgun shells.

Jeanette has been up since 4:30 a.m., packing in her bedroom a half hour north of Homestead. She decided, despite never having gone hunting, that today she is going to find a Burmese python. Her father had come from Cuba as a boy as part of Operation Peter Pan. He'd lived in Camp Matecumbe, a shelter for immigrant boys, and had survived by venturing into the Glades and capturing rattlesnakes and water moccasins to sell to anti-venom centers. Development kept moving south from Miami, and the family kept trying to escape it.

Homestead is growing fast but is still clean. City air has a tendency to make Jeanette physically ill. Crohn's disease landed her in the hospital before her participation in the last python challenge began; this time, she is breathing clear. She takes her eye off the sniper sight and pats her wallet, makes sure her ID is in place in case anyone needs to identify her body. You never know.

The life of all flesh is its blood. Leviticus. Blood is sacred, so if you spill an animal's on the floor, it had better be for good reason. This is a fine reason.

She lowers the AR-15 and para-cords it to her backpack; the 12-gauge shotgun she straps to her shoulder. Antoine puts his .40 into its holster, and Mike fingers his .45. "Let's go get this sucker," Jeanette says.

After a day of hunting and walking, the Dukes of Florida arrive at the missile silo. Vines climb and rubble lies strewn. Jeanette pumps her 12-gauge, back to the wall of the entrance. The smell of recent trespassers' weed hangs. Mark and Antoine hold their handguns to their chests, pivoting into dark, graffiti-lined rooms. The Dukes of Florida all have families with military or police backgrounds, so they know that caution is necessary if you want to stay alive. This is also where the gangs of Homestead like to hang out, and it is rumored that the police have found bodies here. Then there are alligators, rattlesnakes, and water moccasins, not to mention the python. Better to be armed.

Jeanette searches along a ladder that leads into a flooded passage. The glow of her cell phone brings a dim illumination while the other two search through electrical boxes outside. "Maybe next time we should bring real flashlights!" she shouts.

Later, outside, they take a break on a canal-side dock. Jeanette peers through the assault-rifle scope at the opposite bank. Nothing moved in the high noon but the grasses. Then she spots something. "Alligator," she whispers. Antoine and Mark snap up, take a look.

It's a Powerade bottle.

The Dukes of Florida continue down Aerojet in formation, stalking the paved roads where snakes often soak up the last heat of day. Antoine and Mike walk on the sides, poking through the scrub. Mike stops. He and Jeanette help build Kingdom Halls in North Miami and attend meetings, but he prefers hunting in the Glades—God is as much here as He is there.

Jeanette stays focused on the pavement ahead, on the heat mirages on the road, watching them disappear one by one. One of them doesn't. "Guys," she says. "Look." Antoine and Mark glance up from the bushes at an 11-foot Burm, a gift from God, sunning in the middle of the road.

Mike pulls his handgun, and Antoine stops him. "Jeanette's going to do this."

Mike moves in front of the python to distract it while Jeanette circles around back. Four feet away, she holds the barrel out. She has a perfect headshot. The snake turns around and lunges as she fires, and it falls backward, its body blown apart a foot below its head. The wound looks like an open mouth smeared with lipstick.

"I got it! I got one!" she yells.

(L-R) Jeanette Meneses, Mike Mann, and Antoine James.

The python tenses and thrashes, gravely wounded, spasming. The seconds slow as Jeanette watches. The snake won't lie still long enough to shoot a second time.

Mike fires his pistol at it. The bullet bounces off the pavement and ricochetes into the trees.

The Dukes of Florida stand around, unsure of what to do, the snake contracting and stretching in agony. It looks like a slinky. Jeanette is torn. She is proud, but hadn't wanted it to be quite like this. She keeps the shotgun sighted. She waits for enough life to drain out for her to put its lights out for good.

There's a sacredness to hunting, but there is nothing sacred about this. There is something degrading in taking so much life that we put there in the first place. She keeps her mind on the greater goal. This is what the Everglades needs: a little tough love.

The snake's life slowly evaporates upward into the warm Florida air, where, high above, rising over the Australian pines, over the spongy melaleuca trees, in the clouds that nourish the rescued wetland, one has a view of the grandest circus on the East's final frontier: where Will Nace puts his head in an alligator's mouth for a clapping audience, where Alligator Ron's rock mines feed the ever-southward development, where invasive species creep northward, on the Python Challenge, on the Everglades themselves, or what is left of them, and, on a single speck on Aerojet Road, on Jeanette watching her python writhing, tensing, convulsing, waiting for it to end.

Finally, its struggle ebbs. The snake's head remains in place a moment, and Jeanette fires. The Everglades are once again still.