Mike Kimmel, the Python Cowboy: Hunting Invasive Species in the Everglades

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 372, Mike Kimmel...

Cold Open: Meet the Python Cowboy

Mike Kimmel: My passion was a lot stronger than anything that came with getting bit. Honestly, getting bit is a part of the thrill a lot of times for me. There's rarely a python hunt I don't get bit — it's just kind of a part of it, and I'm not concerned about getting really bit. Now, some of these bigger animals, obviously I'm being more careful. I don't want to have to pay for a hospital or anything like that — a lot of times I'm sewing myself up, which I'm not a huge fan of. So I'm definitely being careful, but my main concern when I'm handling these animals is focused on them: keeping them safe and making sure they don't get away and escape from me. If I've got to take a bite in the process, we can deal with that later. So this is Trapper Mike, and you're watching the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I've got an awesome one today — somebody I follow on Instagram. His name is Trapper Mike. He also goes by the Python Cowboy. His name's Mike Kimmel, and he is a very interesting dude who is a state-contracted python hunter in the Everglades. He does so much else besides that, and he has a tremendous amount of knowledge about native wildlife versus invasive species, and why we need to get rid of some of the invasive species — the problems they're causing, all kinds of very interesting stuff. I learned a ton, and Mike is a cool guy who communicates really well and has a lot he can teach us all. So stand by for this conversation with Trapper Mike, the Python Cowboy, Mike Kimmel.

Tom Rowland: Trapper Mike, what's going on, man? How are you?

Mike Kimmel: Good, good. How are you doing?

Tom Rowland: Man, I'm doing great. I follow you on Instagram and have for a while. You're a wild man — you're an interesting character, and you're doing some amazing things. I've got to find out more about what's going on with you.

Mike Kimmel: Oh, man, happy to share for sure.

Growing Up Building a Reptile Obsession in Stuart, Florida

Tom Rowland: So from outward appearances, you're a state-contracted hunter of python and other invasive species. Is that fair to say, or how would you classify yourself?

Mike Kimmel: It's definitely confusing. There's kind of a lot to explain because it's all across the board. As far as what I'm state-contracted for, I'm just contracted by the state for the pythons. They're actually currently working on a hog program, and they're considering me for that as well, which I'm excited about. But all the hog work I do, all the iguana work I do, even a lot of the monitors, Egyptian geese — basically everything outside of pythons is almost always a private contract, either from a private homeowner or, more often, an entire property, an entire community, an entire ranch, an entire farm. For a lot of these invasive species, me targeting just one person's house doesn't make sense, and I'm not trying to sell people a dream. So I like to get everybody on board — usually it's a whole gated community or neighborhood. The iguanas have been keeping me very busy lately.

Tom Rowland: Well, let's rewind a little bit. Before we get into that, I usually wait until the very end, but you have so much good social media — I want people to go check out what you're doing right now, because so much of this you've got to see for yourself. You've got these giant snakes and all this stuff you're pulling out of the Everglades. How would people follow you?

Mike Kimmel: Python Cowboy is my Instagram, and my YouTube is also Python Cowboy. That's your best bet for getting an idea of everything, because it's hard to explain everything I've got going on — people kind of need to follow it for a while to see, because it's not just me going out and removing these animals. I get them back to the ranch. I try to rescue them, keep them alive, use them for education. Or, if I'm forced to euthanize, I make use of the skin, the meat, the bones — everything. That's become a whole other facet of it: my side hustles on the back end, and that's what really fuels the conservation.

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about how you got into this line of work.

Mike Kimmel: It's always been something I was interested in. Even as a kid I had like twenty reptiles — snakes, chameleons, geckos, anything you can imagine — and anything I didn't know, I was trying to run around and catch and turn into a pet. I used to actually breed and sell these reptiles, a lot of the same reptiles I'm hunting today, for allowance money. So for me it's kind of come full circle.

Tom Rowland: Where did you grow up?

Mike Kimmel: I grew up in Martin County, in Stuart, Florida — born and raised.

Tom Rowland: So this has gone full circle back to the kind of things you were seeing in pet stores — now those things are running wild in Florida.

Mike Kimmel: Yes. Responsible pet owners aside, a lot of it comes from animals escaping, being released, hurricanes destroying pet-store facilities where they escape, zoos — all kinds of stuff.

Tom Rowland: Florida's obviously a wonderful state for growing things — it's warm all the time, you've got the Everglades, tons of food for lots of species. I'd imagine part of the problem is that these animals don't have the natural predators they'd have on their home turf.

Mike Kimmel: Not only that — our wildlife here has no natural instincts to defend against these predators. In their native range it's tougher for them to catch and kill animals than it is here. Here it's just a buffet. These animals have no idea — they'll walk right up to these big pythons and try to step over them. They have no natural defenses, and that's what's allowed the invaders to get a grip and take over. It's the same with a lot of invasive species, like our Nile monitors — a rabbit isn't expecting a six-foot lizard to charge into its den and destroy it and its babies. It's been a very serious thing for sure.

Tom Rowland: I want to know — when you were a kid, when did you get over the fear of getting bit by all these things? I had a garter snake as a kid that bit me, and even though that's about the most harmless snake on the planet, it scared the crap out of me and I didn't want anything to do with snakes anymore.

Mike Kimmel: I don't even know if I got over it — I think my passion was always a lot stronger than anything that came with getting bit. Honestly, getting bit is like a part of the thrill a lot of times for me. There's rarely a python hunt I don't get bit. Now with some of these bigger animals I'm obviously more careful — I don't want to pay for a hospital, and a lot of times I'm sewing myself up, which I'm not a huge fan of. But my main concern when handling these animals is keeping them safe and making sure they don't escape. If I take a bite in the process, we deal with that later. I'd say the passion just keeps it on track.

Tom Rowland: It's interesting, because I'm not afraid of getting bit by a fish — a barracuda or even a shark — I could take a shark bite. But some people wouldn't want to be six feet from a shark. That's how I feel about snakes.

Mike Kimmel: Sharks freak me out way more than any reptile or land animal, even an alligator. I'll swim with an alligator before I'll swim with a shark any day.

Tom Rowland: Well, it's a good thing there are people who like sharks and people who like alligators. When did it go from being a kid's hobby to actually a paying gig to go catch something?

Mike Kimmel: I'd say after my teens. As a kid I was making money selling these animals, which is kind of what I still use today — those salesman skills, figuring out how to make a dollar off an animal after I catch it. But as far as actually getting paid for a removal, it wasn't until my later teens or even twenties, when I was really starting to build my business. And even then, people don't understand wildlife work — there isn't much money in it if you're doing it the way I'm doing it. A lot of people out here do it dishonestly — basically just doing construction work on homes to keep animals out. That's not what I want to do. There's not much money in my line of work unless you can really turn a profit. So I took everything I learned as a kid and applied it, and I started doing a lot of jobs for free when I started out, trying to build a name and a reputation, show people I'm trustworthy, hustle these animals on the back end. Then I built my company, built my reputation, landed a first real contract gig, and that's when we started to charge money and make money. But even then it's always a struggle — it's been the last decade really building the company.

Tom Rowland: And that first gig — what was the problem animal?

Mike Kimmel: I think the first real paying gig was iguanas, about ten years ago or so.

Why Iguanas Are a Bigger Problem Than People Think

Tom Rowland: A lot of people who aren't from Florida don't understand why the iguana is such a problem. Tell people — for someone listening in Ohio or California — why has the iguana become such a problem in Florida?

Mike Kimmel: The iguana is specifically a huge problem, just as much as the python, but in a different way. A lot of people don't understand that — they see the iguana and just see a pet, and they ask why I'm killing these things. At the very worst, all they do is eat flowers, which doesn't sound that bad, but they cause millions of dollars in landscape damage every year. That's not why I'm removing them, though — I couldn't care too much about that. What they're really doing is digging burrows that undermine sidewalks, seawalls, housing foundations, roadways, and levees. Davie alone just spent $1,700,000 last year repairing iguana damage to just their levees — and that's just Davie. So you can see across the board what they're causing, and it doesn't stop there. They're affecting native wildlife too, which a lot of people don't realize, because iguanas don't prey on native wildlife — but that doesn't mean they don't affect it.

Tom Rowland: How do they affect it?

Mike Kimmel: I've watched big bull iguanas chase down and attack native animals. I've sat there and watched them go inside other animals' burrows and destroy their nests. A very common species they do that to is the gopher tortoise and the burrowing owl — both threatened species in Florida, so iguanas are pushing them closer to endangered. On top of that, they crap everywhere — it's unreal, it's nasty — and their feces can contain salmonella and other illnesses. As a small population they're not a big deal, but as soon as they explode — and they will, every time, in these communities — people come calling saying they didn't think it was going to be a problem and that they're up to their eyes in iguana poop, with sidewalks cracking and seawalls falling. Once it gets that bad, it takes a lot to get under control, and you'll never get it totally under control — you may get it managed, but it'll be something you have to constantly manage. That's why it's so important to nip it in the bud before it becomes a huge problem. That's another thing people don't understand: just because an invasive species isn't a problem now doesn't mean that in five years it won't be the biggest problem the state of Florida has. That's really what we're looking at with the iguanas.

The Next Wave: Mexican Spiny-Tailed Iguanas and Tegus

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about some of the other problem animals you're routinely going after, and their effect on native wildlife or structures. That seawall damage is a real problem — those are expensive, and you need a permit just to fix them.

Mike Kimmel: It's a lot, dude — people don't understand that; they look at just the face value and don't see everything else that goes into it. And like you said, it's not just the iguanas. The Mexican spiny-tailed iguana is the new up-and-coming species — I'm starting to see them everywhere from Martin County down to Homestead, and they do the same thing except they're very aggressive; they'll actually chase you down to try to bite you, which is very uncommon for an iguana.

Tom Rowland: How big are those?

Mike Kimmel: As big as the green iguana, but they're a formidable opponent — they get four or five feet tip to tip and have a mouthful of teeth to back it up. A buddy of a buddy went down to try to capture one in Central America, where they're native — he grabbed a big male, and it turned around and bit his hand. He ended up with an impressive number of stitches, and his whole hand was just filleted open, like someone took a box cutter blade and opened it up — you could see the whole inner workings of his hand.

Tom Rowland: So how did those end up here? That seems like the worst pet you could possibly have.

Mike Kimmel: From the pet trade — they're beautiful, even more beautiful than the green iguana in my opinion. Kept in captivity, fed and handled, it's a totally different animal than a feral, wild Mexican spiny-tailed iguana — same as a feral iguana versus a pet iguana. A feral iguana isn't going to let you pick it up; it's going to run away from you, or scratch the living hell out of you and try to bite you. And the prime example of that difference is the black-and-white Argentine tegu. They've got a big population down in Homestead, but it's been really controlled up until this point by private trappers — people who aren't even getting paid by anybody. They come down from Orlando, from Georgia, from all over the country to set traps and catch these tegus for free, because they can then sell the wild tegus as pets. Tegus are unique because even if they're born and raised in the wild to adulthood, they're super mean and super skittish, but after a few months of feeding and handling them, they tame down really well. The big problem now is that the state of Florida just made iguanas and tegus illegal to own, so all of that goes away — those private trappers are no longer coming down here controlling the population for free. I expect in the next few years the tegu population to spread out of Homestead into Boca, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, and all the surrounding areas, and it's going to become a big problem, especially for the Everglades, because tegus prey almost exclusively on eggs and meat — crocodile eggs, alligator eggs, bird eggs — and all of those species are very important to our ecosystem.

Tom Rowland: When they make it illegal like that, wouldn't that almost automatically spawn a black market for the animals? People couldn't be trapping as openly, but wouldn't that make them more valuable?

Mike Kimmel: Absolutely. What happens is you get illegal activity, and with illegal activity comes irresponsible owners — you're cutting out all the responsible owners and keeping the irresponsible ones. And now you're causing people who get scared by the new law to dump their reptile because it's illegal. It's the worst thing they could have done, and it's something we've been fighting for years — they've been trying to get this underway for the past five years or more, and everyone in the reptile community and the wildlife industry who knows anything has always been against it. They made the Burmese python illegal and it just made the problem worse, and I expect to see this iguana and tegu problem explode.

Tom Rowland: So in your opinion, with the experience of the iguana and the python, what would be a better policy?

Mike Kimmel: Definitely not discouraging these free trappers from coming down. These tegus can only survive in a small area of South Florida, and the trappers are shipping them all out of state — they're not changing anything by banning ownership, they're just taking away a solution. We need to be adding solutions, not taking them away. We need more state-funded programs like the python program, and we need to be encouraging hunters to go out on their own and make money from these animals, because there's value in the skin, the meat, and everything else. With all these rules, laws, and lack of access, it makes it impossible — it stacks all the odds in favor of the invasive species. The Burmese python wasn't that big of a problem before the nineties. What did they do? They turned the Everglades into a national park, kicked all the "gladesmen" out — all the eyes and ears in the Everglades — and then the pythons just took over. That's what we have to stop from happening again with these other species.

Hunting Pythons In and Around Everglades National Park

Tom Rowland: That's something I've never fully understood. The Everglades National Park isn't the same as what people generally call the Everglades — there's a much bigger area people consider the Everglades. So is it legal for a regular person to harvest a python out of the Everglades outside the national park?

Mike Kimmel: There's no harm in a regular person doing it outside the park. But if a normal person is inside the national park and sees an eighteen-foot python killing a native deer, they can take a picture and keep going — that's it. Which I'm very against, honestly. I know why they do it — they're worried about people killing native species by mistake — but we need to punish the action, not make it harder to take the action. We make it legal to remove the python but keep it illegal to remove any other snake, and that's made known, so anybody going out to hunt python takes it upon themselves to make sure they're making the right call, or they face consequences. There's an easy way to tell the difference between a python and a native species — we now have classes people can take, and awareness on social media and the news means people know what a python looks like by now. You're not going to mistake a ten-foot snake for a native. We don't want to just send a bunch of people into the national park gung-ho, and that's what they make it seem like — either nothing at all, or rednecks with shotguns — and that's not so.

Tom Rowland: Can someone like you, a state-contracted hunter, go into Everglades National Park and hunt there?

Mike Kimmel: I can, and this is actually a new change. There are two different programs — the South Florida Water Management District program and the FWC program — and they're now aligning the rules to be the same. But for the past three years I haven't been able to go into the national park and remove pythons, and even now, inside the park, I'm not allowed to keep the snake, which for me is half my profit, from the skin and the meat. To clarify, the national park is only a quarter, maybe half, of the Everglades — the Everglades stretch all the way up to technically Lake Kissimmee, but more or less it's Lake Okeechobee on down. So we have all the different conservation areas and Water Management Areas around the national park where the general public and all the python contractors can hunt. The general public in a lot of these conservation areas needs keys to access the levees to drive, which only python contractors like me have, but they can still bicycle, boat, or drive the public levees in trucks. A lot of people who want to get into python hunting should know — right now the public roads are producing more pythons than anywhere else. Along the Tamiami Trail, west of the casino all the way to Everglades City, pythons are crossing that highway and that levee all night, and people can just drive up and down with lights on, and I promise you'll pick up a couple.

Signs the Everglades Ecosystem Is Bouncing Back

Tom Rowland: People always ask you if there's a light at the end of the tunnel with the python problem. What are you seeing?

Mike Kimmel: This past three years I've seen a big increase in native wildlife, which to me means it's working. The first two years, I literally saw nothing — not one rabbit, raccoon, possum, otter, or squirrel — driving levees that stretch twenty miles or more into the middle of the Everglades, high ground that wildlife should be all over, and there was just nothing. Now, in the areas we've been hitting, I've seen raccoons this past year, I'm starting to see rabbits — which is the big tell for me — squirrels, otters, everything. Before, the only thing I was seeing was rats, because that's all that could keep up with the pythons breeding out there. This last year I've seen a huge boost in wildlife, and I thought we were crushing it, that there's a light at the end of the tunnel and maybe there aren't as many pythons as we think. But this hatching season, we've never caught so many pythons — it's unreal, so I'm almost backpedaling on what I've been saying. What I think is going on is that we've taken out the majority of the large pythons — the ones eating the raccoons and rabbits and bigger stuff. They laid eggs before we got them, those nests have been hatching, and those hatchlings are getting bigger, so now we're catching hatchlings up to a couple years old, which is roughly eight feet.

Tom Rowland: Eight feet in two years?

Mike Kimmel: Oh yeah — in the first year they're six feet. It's crazy. In that first year of the program, everything I was catching was over ten foot. So what's happened is we've hit them hard and taken out the majority of the big ones, which is helping the wildlife more than you'd believe. The little ones are still eating the rats and starting to show their ugly faces more, so it seems like there's a ton of them, but as we keep working on those little ones it'll trickle down to where we're not catching as many. It's looking a lot better across the board with sizes, and honestly, even if we're constantly managing these little ones going forward, that's not the worst thing in the world — as long as they're not preying on our raccoons and our larger, struggling species, we can work with that.

Tom Rowland: You said you weren't able to hunt in the national park for a while, but the rules changed. What were you seeing when there was a total lack of pressure on these snakes when you first got in there?

Mike Kimmel: For me, I've never really wanted to hunt in the national park, for the sole reason that I know I can't keep my pythons. I personally think they're probably wasting them — they do a little research and then toss them, and I don't like stuff being wasted, especially knowing how valuable the skin is. So I don't hunt in the park much, but I know other people who do, and there have always been volunteers and park rangers removing pythons in there, so there's always been a little pressure on them. And inside the national park you really can't leave the main road, so it's not the best hunting in the world anyway — I prefer other areas where I can get off the levee and explore, and I have good luck doing that.

How the Burmese Python Took Over Florida

Tom Rowland: A lot of people bring in all kinds of snakes through the animal trade — cobras, boa constrictors, some of the most dangerous snakes out there. Why is it the python that's really taken off, and we don't have an overabundance of cobras or boa constrictors — or maybe we do?

Mike Kimmel: That's a very good question, and we do have breeding populations of other species — there's a population of red-tailed boas down in a gated community in Miami where I could probably catch one or two in a night, and rainbow boas in Homestead, small populations, but nothing compares to the python. The reason is that in the nineties and before it was made illegal, the Burmese python was the most popular snake to own — they're easy to take care of, great eaters, they grow super fast, and they tame down very easily even though they're not naturally docile. They're healthy, easy to keep, and they just get massive, which people find impressive — until they get that massive and people don't know what to do. Pigs and goats are expensive; how do you feed a python that size unless you're willing to spend a couple hundred dollars a month? Most people aren't, so they release them, or the snakes escape — they're master escape artists. I've talked with some of the old-school reptile guys, like the folks at Strictly Reptiles, who've been doing this for decades, and they told me it wasn't unusual to get a shipment of a thousand Burmese pythons in and have it be gone in a week — every single week, thousands and thousands. That shows how many were being pushed out, and that's been the main contributor, along with the fact that they're such good survivors. Because they come from the reptile trade, they have higher immunities, higher appetites, higher sex drives, they lay bigger clutches of eggs, and they're more resistant to disease and parasites in general — they're basically a super snake, and they've just taken over.

Beyond Pythons: Monitors, Egyptian Geese, and More

Tom Rowland: The python is obviously where you spend a lot of your time, but looking at your Instagram and videos, you're going after all kinds of other things — armadillos, monitor lizards. One post I thought was really interesting was the monitor lizard you caught that kicked your ass trying to get it. What's the status of those things right now?

Mike Kimmel: There are a couple of different species of monitor lizard. The one that's currently illegal is the Nile monitor, and wouldn't you know it, that's the one we have the biggest problem with. The others — the white-throat monitor, black-throat monitor, Savannah monitor, Asian water monitor — are essentially the exact same lizard, just with a slightly different pattern or head shape, but we don't have breeding populations of those because they're not illegal to own. For example, when I went to get this particular monitor, I got a call from a homeowner. I'd actually been on the hunt for what I thought was a Nile monitor in Martin County, so when I got the call that they'd seen a monitor, I figured we were on to something — normally I'm a lot more skeptical. What made me believe it was that they said it had the pattern of an alligator but was one hundred percent not an alligator, and they could see its head sticking out of a generator box. I knew the area didn't have much water nearby, so it wasn't going to be an alligator, and I don't know of any green iguanas in that area either. It was still enclosed in a stainless-steel generator box on the side of the house when I got there, about an hour later, and there was a whole crowd of people waiting. I set traps on both holes on either end of the box in case it bolted. My experience capturing monitors before is that they're extremely fast and extremely wily — unlike anything I'd ever captured. The first time I grabbed one, it tried to twist its own head off in my hand with pure muscle, spun out of my grip, and took off running. I dove on it, got its tail and head, and it folded its body in half on itself like it had no bones, trying to bite the living crap out of me. I had to wrestle with it for a good ten or fifteen minutes and was blown away by how it moved and the power it had.

Mike Kimmel: So with that in mind, I brought my lead dog, Moose, who'd actually helped me capture a Nile monitor before, for backup in case this thing spun out of my hands and took off. I had all the homeowners watching as I slowly opened the box and looked inside, and I could tell right away it wasn't a Nile monitor — it was a big white-throat monitor, which was extra cool for me because I can legally keep one without special licensing, and I've had the license before, I just need to renew it. It's a lot more relaxed bringing this one places since it's not a controlled species, so I can use it for education at events with kids and give it a new life instead of putting a bullet in its head — the last thing I want to do as a reptile lover is catch a big, cool monitor and just kill it. But I still had to get it out of the box, and I didn't know if it was friendly or how long it had been in the wild. I was expecting it to be somewhat tame since I don't know of any breeding populations of white-throats in Martin County, but as soon as I got my hands on it I could tell it wasn't tame — it was hissing, pissed off, trying to chop my fingers, and when it tried to bite it sounded like dropping a Bible on the kitchen floor. Monitors are notorious for not letting go once they bite, so I didn't want to get tagged. It worked its way underneath the generator, sprawled out using leverage, and I couldn't get it out — after fifteen or twenty minutes, with a little help from the homeowner, we got it out, it was lunging at me, and I got it under control. Everybody was stoked, and it went really well. I already had an enclosure half-built for whatever crazy reptile I expected to catch, so I finished it up, put him in there, and now he eats a big rat every other day. He's a lot of fun.

Working Dogs, Deer Management, and Disease Testing

Tom Rowland: It's interesting how you use your dogs — how many do you have?

Mike Kimmel: With the three new puppies I got last week, we have fifteen.

Tom Rowland: Fifteen dogs. Do you have any hunting background with dogs — coon hunting or anything like that? Where does all the dog work come from?

Mike Kimmel: Not really — more just owning and training dogs than using them for hunting. What really got me into using them for hunting is my girlfriend and her dad, Allie and Go-Kart Ricky — they call him that because he drives his two-and-a-half-ton swamp buggy like a go-kart all around the swamp. They've been doing it their whole lives — Allie was six months old in a car seat on the swamp buggy catching hogs. I love doing it with them, and with the conservation work I do, I realized we're using these dogs to catch hogs and it helps the ecosystem, so I'm starting to use them on jobs for everything, and it's been a game-changer. We have a dog, Otto, who helps me big time on iguanas, Egyptian geese, and tracking deer, and Moose helps me track deer too. People get confused when I mention deer, since deer aren't an invasive species, but I do more than just invasive-species work — it's general Florida conservation. Because Florida's so developed, I have to manage native species too, for the health of the population, the ecosystem, and our infrastructure.

Tom Rowland: What's an example of deer being a problem — in a community or somewhere else?

Mike Kimmel: Not so much in a community — more often it's a farm or an area where the deer population is so plentiful they're inbreeding and developing health issues, so I'll come in and thin the population to a healthier state, working with a state biologist who permits how many I can remove. More often than not it's a farm where the deer have exploded out of control, the population's unhealthy, and they're devastating crops in the surrounding areas, costing farmers hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

Tom Rowland: Do you have to take them out one at a time, or can you trap them like hogs?

Mike Kimmel: You can trap hogs, but trapping deer usually isn't successful, and I don't do it that way — I hunt them one at a time. I have a lot more luck hunting: I go out with thermal scopes and suppressors on my rifles, using subsonic ammo so it sounds like a BB gun, and I can drop a herd of three or four, one right after the other. We're not trying to wipe them out — we're trying to thin them and get back to a healthier state, so you're not trying to remove the masses; you're working your way there slowly to see what looks right.

Tom Rowland: When a biologist comes in and says you need to take out fifty, or whatever the number is, does he give you that number and you go take it out?

Mike Kimmel: Generally he'll give me maybe ten tags at a time, and I keep applying for more as I go, because everything I'm reporting — before I even head out I call and let them know what weapons I have, what truck I'm in, who I'm with, how long we'll be out — and afterward I report how many I got, male, female, weight, everything. Recently I've even been cutting off the deer heads. We get some monster trophies you'd want on your wall, but you're not allowed to trophy-hunt using the deer tags — by law you have to leave the cape and the head with the rack on-site where you killed it. But I've been working with state biologists, giving them the heads so they can test for chronic wasting disease and other illnesses. That's our protection against these diseases working their way in — hunters like me out there removing deer, managing the population, and having the animals tested, so we catch a problem before it becomes a problem.

Tom Rowland: What's the status of the wasting disease you're seeing, or anything else we should be concerned about with deer?

Mike Kimmel: There's all kinds of stuff they can get — neurological and brain diseases, respiratory issues, gut issues, everything. I'm by no means an expert on all of it — I just kind of go with what the biologists want, and right now the main thing they're testing for is chronic wasting disease, because in other states it's totally taken over. We're very fortunate down here in Florida — we don't have too many issues with our deer, but that's because we work very hard at managing them properly.

The Trouble With Wild Hogs

Tom Rowland: Another thing you spend time on is hogs — they've been an invasive species for a long time and cause all kinds of problems. Why is the hog bad?

Mike Kimmel: The hog can definitely be bad. I actually like hogs in small numbers, though hogs in small numbers are just hogs in big numbers waiting to happen. I like having them around almost like deer — it's a nice game animal, a great resource Florida has, the meat is fabulous, and it's easily harvested; you can even catch and keep them alive in a pen and fatten them up, which is what I do. But they can be an amazing problem, because in large numbers they use their nose to shovel up the ground, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but if you saw the destruction it's unbelievable — it looks like a tractor came through and tilled up the whole ground, to the point it's unusable unless you bring in heavy equipment, and even then it's a lot of work; you can't mow it, you can't do anything with it, it just devastates the land. A lot of times I get brought in because they're ripping up farms, eating crops, or coming into gated communities and golf courses, tearing up the greens and people's lawns — and with a lot of HOAs and POAs, you're not allowed to have your yard looking like that. What people also don't understand is that hogs are extremely aggressive meat-eaters. My hogs here on the ranch almost exclusively eat meat — iguana meat, python meat, hog meat, everything, they're cannibals and they love it. I've seen them carrying away a fawn to go eat, so they're preying on and killing native wildlife. I've been out calling for coyotes with an electronic predator call mimicking a dying rabbit, and here comes a pack of three big old boar hogs looking to eat instead. So they've got a lot of consequences beyond the agricultural and infrastructure damage.

Tom Rowland: Is most of your hunting done at night — do you do a lot of night work?

Mike Kimmel: Oh yeah, it's twenty-four seven — all day, all night, morning, everything.

Tom Rowland: How do you get your schedule for the week going — do you know what's happening, or is it call by call?

Mike Kimmel: A lot of times I might know a week out, or I might know three days ahead, but a lot of times it's whatever's coming, which can be stressful — I don't always know bills are getting paid next month, though thank the Lord they've been getting paid. There's nothing written in stone for me — it's a mix of emergency calls, new jobs coming in, and preexisting contracts I can go to on my own leisure whenever I want, which I keep in my back pocket to fill in days when I don't have a call for something. Almost all my iguana contracts and a lot of my hog contracts are freestanding like that, where I manage them whenever I can get in there — same with the python contract with the state.

Tom Rowland: All that takes a long time to build up, though — to have deals where you can go clear geese off a golf course, say. What about the Egyptian geese? We see a lot of Canada geese on golf courses too that people don't like.

Mike Kimmel: Geese are protected under the migratory bird acts, since they migrate down here, but the African Egyptian geese don't migrate — they're strictly from the pet trade, so they're open season. That doesn't mean you can go out and just whack a bunch in a park, though, because you'll get in trouble.

Tom Rowland: When you say open season, does that mean anybody could kill those?

Mike Kimmel: Yep, as long as it's done legally — that's the little asterisk.

Tom Rowland: Do you need a license, or what does that mean in practice?

Mike Kimmel: You don't need anything, but you're not allowed to just go to a public park and start killing them — most of them are either in public parks or on private property. If they're on your own private property, take them out by any means necessary, because it's your property. If it's outside your property you can still take them out, but you want to make sure you're doing it humanely and legally, because you most likely won't be able to use a firearm — it may even be iffy using an air rifle, which is what I use — and you're going to have a lot of people pretty upset, probably calling the cops, who'll probably want you to stop so they don't have to keep answering calls. So while it's legal and you're allowed to do it, it's most likely not going to be very easy.

Tom Rowland: Do you ever run into issues like that doing your contracted work — people asking why you're killing something?

Mike Kimmel: Definitely, but generally I'm very careful — over this past decade I've learned how to go about it properly. I'm usually not shooting something in front of somebody else, for safety, and because people are crazy these days, especially about animals, and I don't want anyone claiming psychological damage. Anytime I'm carrying my air rifle I carry it non-threateningly, down by my side by the butt, and I usually wear a bright yellow reflective vest with my logo on it. If I see anybody I quickly identify myself, wave, and say I'm the iguana guy contracted by the community — most likely they've already heard about me, and a lot of these communities are very intrigued, so usually I'm good to go. It's when I get a random single-home job in the middle of a community, where none of the neighbors know what's going on, that I have more issues — so I don't usually take jobs like that unless they get the community on board first. It's been a learning process to eliminate all that, but I used to get death threats, and I used to get FWC coming to my house almost every week. It's been a lot of growing pains, I guess you could say.

Building the Python Cowboy Following on Social Media

Tom Rowland: What about the social-media side — the YouTube and Instagram you're building — that has to be generating some income too. Does that go hand in hand? You do a great job at it, by the way — I watch your videos, they're fantastic, especially, selfishly, when you get bit. People love to watch somebody get bit.

Mike Kimmel: People love it.

Tom Rowland: When you caught that giant snake — the state record — did it hold the record?

Mike Kimmel: It's a state record for the python program — I don't know if it's the official state record. I think there's one larger snake, but there's all kinds of skepticism about that one, as far as its official length and where it was actually caught — there's suspicion it was actually caught illegally in the national park, so there's stuff up in the air about that one. But the python I caught is the state program's record — seventeen feet seven inches, and that's without us pulling on it; that's literally just how it laid on the ground, whereas every other snake I've seen measured, they're stretching it to get every inch out of it. So she was a true seventeen-foot-seven.

Tom Rowland: In all the pet trade and everything you've seen, have you seen bigger ones than that?

Mike Kimmel: My buddy has one — not a Burmese, a reticulated python — that's about twenty-two feet and maybe two-fifty to three hundred pounds; it's an absolute monster. If people want to see that snake, they can — it's at a small, personal-feeling tourist attraction down in the Everglades called the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, owned by Jack Shealy.

A Quick Detour Into Skunk Ape Lore

Tom Rowland: Do they ever see the skunk ape there? I'd love to see a skunk ape even more than a three-hundred-pound snake. Have you ever seen one? You've spent a lot of time out there.

Mike Kimmel: I don't believe the whole skunk ape thing too much — I think it's more mistaken identity.

Tom Rowland: Well, right behind you in that photo you've got what looks like a black bear standing on its hind legs, walking around.

Mike Kimmel: One of them with mange? No — it looks like a damn skunk ape, I promise you.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I've seen videos of bears of all kinds walking on their hind legs, arms to the side, just walking along — there's one walking right next to a bus, going down the windows — and it looks like a person walking with a funny posture, but it could totally be a bear.

Mike Kimmel: A skunk ape posture.

Tom Rowland: It's interesting how these urban legends are worldwide — every culture has something, whether it's the chupacabra, the skunk ape, Bigfoot, the Yeti, or Mothman. When cultures all around the world have these mythical creatures they can't quite put a finger on, is it too quick to just say no, it isn't real? I don't disbelieve outright, but you spend a ton of time out there — what do you think?

Mike Kimmel: I wouldn't say I a hundred percent don't believe — I don't think it's bull, I guess, I'm kind of up in the air about it. I lean more toward mistaken identity, because I deal with mistaken identity all the time — I get people texting me every single week that they have a damn anaconda in their backyard, and I promise you it isn't; it's a native brown water snake that's maybe five feet.

Tom Rowland: I mean, they're seeing something, because the legend continues — people keep seeing something, they just don't know what it is.

Mike Kimmel: They want to believe it that badly, I guess — but who knows. I'd expect someone like myself, or even a recreational hunter, to have killed one by now, or at least gotten undisputable trail-cam footage, given how many cellular trail cameras are out there now. The new way people refute that is to say Bigfoot's an alien.

Tom Rowland: I don't go into that at all — that's where it totally loses me, the idea that they can sense cameras and all that. But when you've got trail cameras all over the country capturing things like mountain lions in areas where people had no idea mountain lions still existed and hadn't seen one in a hundred years — hundreds of pictures — why can't anyone get a Bigfoot or a skunk ape on camera? Maybe they're smart enough to avoid it, I don't know — though the guy who robbed my neighbor's garage didn't manage to avoid the trail camera either.

Mike Kimmel: You get caught, you don't see it coming — for sure.

How Trapper Mike Went Viral

Tom Rowland: So tell me about the YouTube and how it's grown — I just had Ben Friedman on the show, and that's actually how I got connected with you; he told our audience how he'd seen your online presence grow. Has it been fun for you?

Mike Kimmel: Yeah, it's been crazy for sure. I had no idea — I've been doing this forever and had barely posted on Facebook before. What really started it was getting into the python program, and I rescued an alligator that had an eleven- or twelve-foot python wrapped around it, strangling it. That was actually the third alligator I'd rescued like that, but the first two weren't caught on video. This time I had a gentleman with me who videotaped the whole thing, sent it to the news, and it went viral. The news covered it, and then the owner of a Florida company reached out to me and said he'd just made me an Instagram account, that he was going to send me a bunch of shirts to wear — though he didn't even care about that part — and told me to just start posting, that it was going to be life-changing. He shared me and got me close to a thousand followers just from some of the videos I'd posted, and the response was great, so he told me I was going to kill it, and I just kept going, and it's exploded from there. I had no idea the opportunities and doors it would open. It's actually become super fun for me — I really enjoy showing people, spreading awareness, and interacting with the people following me. I love it.

Tom Rowland: You're good at it, and you bring an educational angle to it too — you're kind of the Everglades' Steve Irwin, not the Everglades turtle man. Turtle Man was so out there that it felt like people just wanted to watch the train wreck. You bring a different kind of thing to it — real education, you speak clearly, everybody can understand what you're doing, and then you're actually producing content and doing crazy stuff, like catching bees. How do you know how to do all this?

Mike Kimmel: A lot of it, like the bees, I really can't take credit for. A buddy of mine, the Bearded Beekeeper, saw me doing these videos and knew he had a bunch of knowledge to share. I have just real basic knowledge on it, but I have a hunger for it all, and at the end of the day I got the courage to be covered in bees and step outside my comfort zone with all these different people, to keep showing different areas of conservation and wildlife — I'm even learning something alongside everybody watching. When I did the bee thing with my buddy — we've got a YouTube video coming out about it soon — I can't tell you how much I learned. We actually got a video of a queen hatching in the nest and joining the nest as the new queen, which he'd never seen in the wild, especially on video — that's a huge deal. It's cool to branch out and do these different things, even though I'm not a beekeeper or a bee expert. Since that video I'm about to bring some bees out to my ranch and start my own little colony, so people get to see me learn as I grow.

Tom Rowland: I think that's really cool, and I think you've got a big future in it — you could take this wherever you want to go, especially since you've got contracts to hunt in all these different places, and that alone yields crazy stories, and you're capturing it all on video.

The Art (and Unpredictability) of Trapping

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about trapping real quick, because trapping is harder than people think — you don't just set a trap and the animal comes in. You've got to be super careful about scent and everything. What's the hardest animal to trap?

Mike Kimmel: It's all relative, honestly. I've trapped coyotes, which are hard for sure, but it depends on the trap you're able to use — there are methods that make almost any animal easy, and every animal is different. So it's hard to say one species is harder than another. Right now, for example, I'm dealing with old Rocky the Raccoon — he's got a name because I've been chasing this sucker for the last month and a half, and I haven't been able to trap him, shoot him, or get my dogs on him; he's just a freaking magician. So this may seem like the hardest animal to trap, but raccoons are generally pretty easy for me. It's really all relative — wildlife is wild, and every single one is different.

Tom Rowland: You said there are methods that make almost any animal easy — what did you mean by that?

Mike Kimmel: For example, coyotes are very hard to trap with a cage trap, but if you set a snare and dig a little hole with some scent down in it, I'm probably going to catch that coyote. But in a lot of areas I'm not allowed to use a snare, because I might catch somebody's dog, or something else I'm not supposed to catch. So it's usually overcoming the obstacles you have that's the real challenge — you might have people walking through the area all the time, putting scent all over your trap, scaring away wildlife, possibly tampering with it, but it's the only area you're allowed to trap. Every job, every scenario, is more challenging than the next.

Tom Rowland: Some of the trappers out west who trap beaver and other animals tell me you've got to be super careful about how you lay a trap down and manage your scent trail, because you can do almost everything right and still mess it up with your scent and catch nothing.

Mike Kimmel: Especially with an animal that's seen a trap before — they're very wary. That's why I like putting a trail camera on my traps, because I have tons of video of an animal coming up, sniffing around, looking, walking around it, and then just walking away because it knew something was up. I've had them sit there for forty-five minutes to an hour deciding, and then just walk off. It's cool to see the different behaviors — some are just dumb as it gets, they'll bump right into the trap and be done, and then some get trapped and find a way to break out, or get trapped and their buddy comes along and lets them out. That happens especially with raccoons.

Tom Rowland: That's what I'd think — a raccoon is smart. Just camping around raccoons, they get your food, they'll shimmy down a line you've hung it from, and you wake up in the middle of the night with them ripping into it.

Mike Kimmel: They're so smart. I've had a few as pets, and that's what really made me realize these things are stupid smart, crazy smart — like a little four- or five-year-old.

A Pet Squirrel and Life on the Ranch

Tom Rowland: What about that little squirrel you've got as a pet that's on your hat and stuff? Do you still have him?

Mike Kimmel: Looking at him right now — yeah, he's in his cage. He hangs around with me all the time; I just took him out the other day, he was running up in the trees and came back to me.

Tom Rowland: How did you get him — an injured animal, or one you had to trap?

Mike Kimmel: A concerned citizen reached out to me — they were in a park and this little baby squirrel climbed up onto them, all skinny and sickly looking, and they could tell something was up with it, so they called me. I think what happened is someone in the area found a squirrel that had fallen out of the nest, raised it up, and when they thought it was big enough to be on its own, they let it loose, but it wasn't quite ready. I got it from them, raised it up, and now he's still crazy friendly, which makes me a little nervous to let him go. On my ranch I have a lot of squirrels and they do fine, but I'm ordering a ten-acre sanctuary for hawks and owls, so if he's not smart enough, he's going to end up as owl poop. I'm still deciding what to do with him — I'm thinking of building him a nice big outdoor enclosure with a little tree in it, so he feels like he's in the wild but is still protected.

Tom Rowland: Well, listen, we've got to do this again — you've got so many stories, and we barely even got to the giant snake you caught, the one that was a hundred and thirty-five pounds and seventeen feet long that bit you in the arm and you looked like you were about to bleed out.

Catching a 17-Foot, 135-Pound Python

Mike Kimmel: What was really cool about that snake is that most of these pythons people catch are on the side of the road or the levee — this one was out in the middle of the Everglades. I had to take my little fourteen-foot John boat out there hunting these spoil islands, and on one of the islands, there she was, this monster stretched out — she'd just eaten something, looked like she'd eaten a big old raccoon. It was the most epic find ever, and what made it even cooler was that it was during the day, when they're more fired up, more energetic and aggressive, which makes for a much harder capture — and being on an island in heavy vegetation made it ten times harder. For me, that's what it's all about — I love challenging myself, I love the battle, and I love being able to say afterward that I got it done and it wasn't easy. It really wasn't easy — not just the capture, taking the bite, getting her off, trying my best not to lose consciousness from blood loss, because I was spraying like a fountain, and then afterward dragging all hundred and thirty-five pounds of her back to the boat. I weigh a hundred and thirty-five pounds myself, to give you an idea, in ninety-five degree heat in the shade, with I don't know how much blood — a good amount for sure. It definitely was not easy, but that's what I love, and we got a cool video out of it.

Tom Rowland: Are you hunting mostly by yourself for something like that, maybe with a dog?

Mike Kimmel: For the pythons, they don't allow me to bring dogs. If they started letting me use dogs, I'd be catching five times the pythons I am now.

Tom Rowland: What would a dog do — how would a dog help to that degree with a python?

Mike Kimmel: The way I envision it, I'd drive the levee in my truck with a dog on each side, and all the pythons I'm passing that are covered by vegetation or down in holes — and there are a lot of them — would stop and basically point like a bird dog and stay six to ten feet away.

Tom Rowland: And they'd be smelling them, not seeing them?

Mike Kimmel: They smell them, yeah.

Training Dogs to Hunt Pythons

Tom Rowland: Training dogs to hunt reptiles — is that a common thing other people do, or is it newer?

Mike Kimmel: Well, the dog either has it or he doesn't. I've actually been training two dogs recently to do this in a private capacity, outside my state contract, because I want to show people what they're missing out on. But going back to "they either got it or they don't" — I had two pointing dogs donated to me, and they don't have it, definitely don't; I got them a little too late in age, and they just don't show the interest or the drive, and don't have what I'd call the reptile nose. It's all about exposure — putting them in controlled scenarios, seeing how they do, rewarding the behavior you want, and a lot of times it's hard to get them to do what you're looking for. That's when it comes back to "they got it or they don't" — if I put a bag that had a python in it next to a dog and he sniffs right past it, more interested in a squirrel, it's going to be a struggle. That's been the case with these dogs, even for birds — they just don't have the hunting drive in them, so I'll most likely rehome them as pets, or maybe part-time bird dogs. I have my eye on a puppy from the same line as my dog Otto, who I use for iguanas and Egyptian geese — he's technically a German wirehaired pointer; both his parents are Drahthaars, and the only reason he's not registered as one himself is that he doesn't have the tattoo in his ear from the German registry system. We're looking at another dog from the same breeder that would be registered — not that it makes any real difference, he'll just have a tattoo. But Otto's amazing — I put him on monitors, iguanas, deer, anything, and he does it all. So we're looking to get one of those puppies, probably going to have to shell out about two thousand dollars, since they're not cheap, and start training from puppyhood the way I like to do it. The dogs I have now that aren't working out are around ten years old — they sat in a kennel their whole lives before I got them, didn't even have names, so they never had proper brain development or hunting-skills development, and that was a big challenge to start with. But going back to how you actually do it — it's exposure, a lot of work, a lot of bonding, and slowly showing them what you want until it clicks in their brain. With hogs it's a lot easier, because I'm not teaching them to stay off and point — I just want them to use their instincts to find it and catch it, which is usually easier to train; they just need grit, they need to have some fight in them.

Tom Rowland: And maybe if you're able to show on video how many more snakes you could catch with dogs, they'd eventually let you use them.

Mike Kimmel: Exactly — and it'll help in the private capacity too, because pythons aren't just out in the Everglades. I was dealing with a python in a park about a year ago and caught a thirteen-foot North African rock python in the middle of a Miami neighborhood, and there's actually a breeding population of them there — every few years or so, one gets spotted.

A Dangerous Encounter With a 13-Foot North African Rock Python

Mike Kimmel: What happened is that five years before the one I caught, which is why the sighting was taken so seriously, a family went into their backyard and found their Siberian husky with a twelve-foot North African rock python wrapped around it — the dog was already dead. The homeowner grabbed a big knife and started slashing and stabbing at the snake, which didn't even faze it. He saw it wasn't doing anything, so he called the authorities, who got there quickly, shot the snake, and the dog was done for. About a week after that, the county came out to mow an easement on the side of that home and chopped up another North African python — so there's a good-sized wooded lot there, maybe ten acres, that definitely has a population in it. When I got the report of a huge constrictor being spotted, I got a picture, thought it looked a little off, did some research, and figured out it was a North African rock python, and remembered one had been caught there five years before. So I staked it out for two days — hunting pythons in the Everglades at night, and in the morning scanning the neighborhood with binoculars for this python to come out and sun itself. I knew North African rock pythons really like heat, so I figured he'd be out sunning closer to eleven or noon, a time that would normally be too hot for Burmese pythons. Sure enough, at eleven-thirty I was scanning and it played out almost exactly like I'd pictured — I saw an object that hadn't been there twenty minutes before, this big dark thing, and I thought it probably wasn't him, but hopped out to look since there was a lot of trash around. Getting about thirty feet away I could see the shimmer, and I knew — that was him. I ran back to my truck to grab my phone so I could get a picture and video, ran back panting with my heart pounding, because I knew these snakes are notoriously aggressive and quick. I got within about ten feet of it, recording, and this thing just started lunging at me, attacking me — I'd never had a python do that before; normally they're trying to get away from you, or you grab them and then they start fighting. This one, as soon as it saw me, came at me, and we wrestled, it spraying poop everywhere and wrapping around my head while I was still trying to videotape. I got it off of me, and it was struggling so hard that it actually prolapsed its own anus in the process — there was this grapefruit-sized thing hanging out of it, rubbing all over my face. That shows you how hard it was fighting. There was a gentleman and a lady sitting on the hood of their car nearby, and when I came up off the ground with this thing wrapped around me, spraying everywhere, they just got in their car and peeled out — didn't even ask if I was all right, just cleared the scene, which I thought was funny.

Mike Kimmel: I kept wrestling with it and eventually got it back to my truck, and by then the whole community was coming out — little kids, grandmothers pulling them away — it was definitely a sight to see. I had to euthanize it, since it's an illegal species, and it was a real wake-up moment for me. I've always been the guy saying, yeah, these pythons are dangerous for the ecosystem, but people don't need to worry, they're not going to eat your kids, all that. That's mostly hype. But there were kids fifty feet away playing basketball, and if their ball had rolled past that snake, they wouldn't have seen it — they'd have walked up to grab it, and that snake, without a doubt, would have attacked one of those kids and overpowered them, no question. Whether it would have eaten them, probably not — it was probably too big for that — but it a hundred percent could have killed one of those kids. That made me realize maybe I shouldn't play it off like it's all hype, because they really can be dangerous. That was a big moment for me in terms of understanding we've got to be careful about these snakes in communities, not just for the dogs.

Tom Rowland: A Siberian husky is basically the size of a small child, and you're telling me a two-year-old python is already eight feet long — nothing grows that fast without eating constantly. It's like a mahi-mahi in the ocean, the fastest-growing fish — it never stops eating, and it grows real fast.

Tom Rowland: Well, you're doing cool stuff, protecting the environment, which I think is great — I love the conservation angle and getting rid of invasive species. I think a lot of people probably learned a ton about why some of these species need to go and why they're exploding in numbers like they are. Cool conversation, man. If people want to support you and follow you, tell them again how, and if there's a way to help you out — donate, or help you get that new puppy?

Why He Hunts Bare-Handed — and How to Follow the Python Cowboy

Mike Kimmel: I appreciate that. I have people trying to donate a lot, but I've always felt funny about accepting cash like that — I'm a proud person, I like feeling like I've earned everything I have, and I don't want any handouts. What I have started doing is offering merchandise — I sell leather products and things like that, which you can find on my website, pythoncowboy.com. My leather products come in batches here and there and sell out almost instantly, so you've got to keep an eye on my Instagram and website for your chance at those — there's a batch on there now, and that's about one percent of what I offer. And of course, my Instagram is Python Cowboy, and right now what's really big for supporting me is watching my YouTube — I get paid for ads, so watching the videos puts some money in my pocket.

Tom Rowland: Subscribe, subscribe — and then you can watch him train up that new puppy, if he gets it. That'd be a whole cool series of videos.

Tom Rowland: One last thing I wanted to ask — you're doing most of this bare-handed on Instagram. Do you not wear gloves for a reason? Do they usually just go right through the gloves, or what?

Mike Kimmel: My number-one concern is not losing the animal and not hurting it, and the best way to make sure of that is by not hindering my hands with any kind of extra gear. Gloves get in the way more than you'd believe in all kinds of scenarios — getting caught on vine structures, being hard to grab with, slipping out of your hands — none of that is good. So I prefer not to wear gloves at all. Now, sometimes if I'm bare-handling a raccoon or something where I know it's going to bite me, I've got no choice but to reach into the cage — raccoons are vicious, and I do have specific raccoon gloves I wear for that. But there have been times I've bare-handed raccoons and paid the price for it, and I've had a few rabies shots as a result.

Tom Rowland: Alright, man — well, I hope you don't get bit tonight, but I'm pretty sure that you will, so I hope it doesn't go in too deep. It was great to get to know you a little bit and hear some stories. I hope we'll do this again — everybody go follow Trapper Mike, he's a really cool dude, and you can learn a lot from his Instagram and his videos, I know I have. So anyway, Mike, thanks a lot, and we'll see you guys next week.

Mike Kimmel: Yes, sir, thank you — thanks for having me on.

Tom Rowland: You bet.