HAINES CITY -- Police Sgt. Mervin Stewart is the man to call if you have a snake in your house.

Or an alligator in your garage.

Or an opossum on your porch.

Stewart, 40, is well known for his extensive knowledge of all things that slither or crawl and is the man the Haines City Police Department dispatches if you are having a creepy-crawly critter crisis.

"I am an animal lover," Stewart said. "But I do like snakes the best. I used to have four but now I only have two at the house: a 10-foot Burmese python and a 3foot Ball python."

Stewart first got interested in snakes when he was 9.

"My mom wouldn't let me have one in the house," Stewart said. "I had to wait until I was out on my own before I could buy one."

When he was single, he let the snakes have run of his house.

"Ray-Ray (the Burmese) would even sleep in the bed with me," Stewart said. "I pretty much let them go where they wanted to go."

Getting married put a stop to that.

"I don't like snakes," said police Cpl. Angela Stewart, who is in charge of communications at the Haines City Police Department. "I don't like them at all. But I love my husband."

So she compromised and Stewart built cages for the snakes and moved them to the garage.

"I am getting better," Angela Stewart said. "I am learning more about them. And I am watching the snake movies and documentaries. But I still don't want to touch one."

Before the two got married, she was keeping one of the snakes at her house while he was at work and it got out of its cage.

"I grabbed the kids and ran out of the house and called him to come find it," she said, laughing about the incident two years later. "I took the kids and we stayed at McDonald's until he could get there. He didn't find that snake for five days."

Now she checks almost daily to make sure the snakes are secured.

"Maybe you could put in the story, `Snakes for sale. See wife,' " she said wistfully. "I could probably take care of that."

In 15 years as an officer, Stewart has answered numerous animal calls, from opossums on a porch to an alligator lying across a road to a family of snakes under one resident's kitchen sink.

"She called and said her house was infested with snakes. I looked but I could only find two grass snakes under the sink. She was glad to see them go, though," Stewart said.

Stewart is known for his snake cuisine.

"Fried snake is really pretty good," he said. "It is hard to explain the taste, but it tastes a little like fish. It is white meat, and it is flaky like fish and it is good."

Stewart likes to bread it in a cornmeal-and-seasoning mixture and deep fry it.

"It is also good broiled. You broil it just like you would fish," he said.

Rattlesnake is a favorite.

"You just have to cut off the head. The venom is in the glands in the head," he said. "It doesn't go through the rest of the body. You just have to be careful cutting off the head."

Stewart cautions people against trying to catch snakes if they are inexperienced.

"Snakes, especially cottonmouths like we have around water here, can be aggressive," he said. "Unless you know what you are doing, I wouldn't try to catch one."

(Amber Smith, www.theledger.com