Bill Kearney: An epic python battle? A big gator ends up with an even bigger snake in its mouth.

Editor’s note: Bill Kearney of the South Florida Sun Sentinel recently headed out to the Everglades, when the unexpected happened.

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It was the seventh alligator we’d seen on the two-mile bike ride through the sawgrass swamp of Everglades National Park. But this one was different. Very different.

In the alligator’s mouth, and draped to his side and twisted underneath his chin was an invasive Burmese python — a big one, thick, rotund, probably twice as long as I am tall.

Were they fighting? Still struggling?

As my 4-year-old son and I dismounted from our bikes, and I walked closer, but not too close, they were motionless. Maybe they were both dead.

The alligator was about 8 feet long, and the python certainly longer, maybe 12 feet, wrapped, folded and chewed, and half submerged.

They were stuck in what looked like the aftermath of an epic swamp battle along the 15-mile bike trail loop at Shark Valley, in Everglades National Park.

I’d come here because my son and I had been cooped up in the house through four straight days of rain and 25-mph winds. But on this day the sun was out, and so were the gators.

In the two miles of bike path that we’d covered, we’d seen those half a dozen gators basking on the shoulder, along with anhingas and turtles and stunning great blue herons as still as trees.

And now, what had been hypothetical — that massive snakes are invading Florida’s ecosystems and hiding in plain sight — suddenly became viscerally real.

Eventually the gator opened its eyes for a moment and shut them, still alive, but motionless, and laying awkwardly as if injured. A few flies lighted upon the snake. Other bikers came by and gasped. A tram full of visitors from Europe and Asia took pictures and surely wondered...