Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (15 page)

My trip would not be occurring anywhere near the start of the regular season, meaning I could hunt either on a government cull trip (already nixed by the magazine) or on privately owned land. On private land in Louisiana, any landowner can kill (or assign someone else to kill) nutria if the animals are causing any type of damage. Because damage goes along almost automatically with the presence of nutria outside their native range, it’s pretty much open season on nutria on private land year-round.

For a solid month I begged everyone I knew or met or bumped into at the grocery store for introductions to anyone who owned some land anywhere in Louisiana that had nutria on it. Eventually my begging paid off with an introduction to someone with family property outside Shreveport, in the northwest corner of the state. I even found a local professional trapper, one Michael Beran, who was willing to show us the ropes.

Jeff and I began making preparations for the Great Nutria Expedition of 2011. Jeff had never fired a gun, but had hopes of hunting nutria himself on this trip. To this end, I offered to give him a crash course in safe hunting. We put together a plan for me to pick him up at the train station in Charlottesville, Virginia, teach him basic riflery before dark, and then start the two-day drive to Shreveport in the morning.

I figured that within a couple of days, we’d bag some nutria meat to cook, drive to New Orleans to cook it with a respected chef there, and then go bar-hopping at jazz clubs for the rest of the week until Jeff’s flight home. I’d drive back to Virginia at my own pace and there we’d be. Then, a little over a week before leaving, I got the word that the magazine would be sending a photographer along with us. He would fly into Shreveport to meet up with Jeff and me, and we’d go off hunting the next day.

Now, photography is a wonderful thing. I’m all in favor of it. My experiences in bringing photographers along on hunting expeditions, however, have been mixed at best. The difficulty lies in competing interests. My job as the hunter is to avoid detection by my prey for as long as necessary in order to find and kill it. The photographer’s job is to take pictures, which often involves noisily moving into positions that make for great angles but spook the prey or block shots. This situation doesn’t always work out well.

For two days, Jeff and I had a fine drive across the South in a car full of guns and ammunition. I pulled off at no-name diners in order to acquaint Jeff’s English palate with the finer points of regional barbecue. (By the way, the more run-down and sketchy a southern barbecue joint looks, the better the food will be. You can take that to the bank.) We discovered a common love of ABBA and Adam Ant, and blasted them all across Mississippi. One can be very secure in one’s masculinity when one is armed to the teeth.

Shreveport surprised me by its strong resemblance to Reno, Nevada. I’m not sure what I was expecting on my first visit to Louisiana, but a casino on every block wasn’t it. We met up with our photographer, Red, and checked into our hotel.

The next morning, we bought our hunting licenses and set out to find our hunting ground. I was stunned at the price of a nonresident hunting and fishing license — thirty dollars a day to hunt small game and another five dollars to fish. I swallowed hard and dropped more than a hundred dollars for the privilege of hunting giant rats for the next three days (with a little fishing on the side).

It was a thirty-minute drive out of the city to where we’d be staying on Caddo Lake, which straddles the northwest border between Texas and Louisiana and is home to alligators, gar, largemouth bass, snapping turtles, catfish, cottonmouths, and wading birds of all sorts. Our host, Jarrett Carter, has a spare cottage built beside his family’s main home only about a hundred yards from the lake. He graciously allowed us to sack out in his cottage for as long as we needed to find and shoot some nutria.

Michael, my professional trapper contact, pulled up in front of the cottage in his truck full of traps, and we walked along the shore discussing the finer points of nutria hunting. He used traps for most of the nutria hunting he did for clients, but he thought shooting would work, too. He was pretty sure they’d float after being shot in the water. He also confirmed my hunch about some nutria tracks I’d seen along the shore, and pointed out some other signs that I’d missed: for example, a small mound of soil and vegetation near the water with tracks around it. Nutria construct these mounds and sit on them at night. It’s not clear why they do this; some trappers believe the nutes are using the mounds for scent marking, to communicate with other nutria. They also seem to prefer to feed while standing on top of them. On later hunts I usually found one of these mounds wherever there were other signs of heavy nutria traffic.

Deep scrapes in the grass were the result of nutria feeding on the lawn, Michael thought. We found marks on the sides of cypress trees where they had clawed off strips of bark. Once I was tuned in to them, I saw signs of nutria everywhere.

As sunset approached, Michael left me with the very valuable loan of a pair of high-tech flashlights. Each light emits a special green laser beam that nocturnal animals don’t seem to react to. These handheld lasers would enable us to illuminate our prey long enough to get off a shot.

The three of us were feeling pretty good as the sun went down. We sat on the comfortable porch looking out to the water. Every few minutes, someone would scan the shoreline with the laser while Jeff or I held a rifle ready to shoot. This seemed like a grand way of hunting nutria. New Orleans was as good as ours. Jeff and Red had the air of men who had struck out on a great adventure, and I couldn’t blame them.

Yet the critters never chose to appear. After a night of unsuccessful hunting punctuated by flashbulbs from Red’s camera, we packed it in at three in the morning. Waking up in the full heat of a Louisiana summer, we spent part of the afternoon fishing to kill time until dusk, at which time I started asking everyone in sight about hunting nutria. The neighbor helping to stain the deck on Jarrett’s parents’ house had a hot tip on where to find some nutria for sure. He gave us directions to a drainage canal in a backwater area of the swamp a few miles away, on pipeline land owned by Citgo. He assured me that nobody would care about some nutria hunting.

At this point, I should clarify what the reality is regarding the limits on nutria hunting in Louisiana. In theory, as I said, there’s a season and bag limits on anything but private land with verified damage. In
practice,
though, people just want the nutria gone and they welcome any effort to clear them out. I spoke with professional nuisance-wildlife trappers in several parishes, local hunters, game wardens, and at least one sheriff’s deputy and the opinion was universal. As long as you aren’t in someone’s backyard, in a park, or in a wildlife management area out of season, nobody cares. They just want the nutria dead.

The official regulatory view of nutria in Louisiana is oddly conflicted, a result of opinions changing over time. When it first showed up in the wild, the nutria was seen as a beneficial natural resource. Trappers in the 1950s had it designated as a fur-bearer, which automatically qualified it for inclusion in all sorts of rules and restrictions designed to allow a fur-bearing species to be hunted in a limited way that ensures its continued presence.

Over the next few decades, it started to become clear that nutria were going to be an ecological disaster. The Army Corps of Engineers found levees riddled with holes and burrows that made them vulnerable to collapse after flooding. Conservationists noticed nutria’s negative effect on native wildlife. Even though the value of nutria pelts was steadily dropping (on a good day, they now go for around five dollars apiece), the old-time trappers didn’t want them to stop being regulated as fur-bearers.

The result was a mixed bag of regulations. On the one hand, Louisiana offers a bounty program for nutria killed by hunters registered through its program. The state also allows the animals to be killed without limit on private land. On the other hand, on public land and waterways there are official bag limits and seasons that were designed to ensure that the species could recover from the hunting of the previous season.

What I found happening in real life is that the fur-bearer status is being ignored by both hunters and law-enforcement agents in most areas. Although one hopes to see sensible laws that are followed and enforced with consistency, Louisiana has a political process that is notorious for corruption, and perhaps what goes on is the best that can be hoped for.

We drove to the canal to see whether the backwater area Jarrett’s neighbor had mentioned was accessible by boat. After spending a long time hunting the bank of that canal by the road and catching a glimpse of at least one nutria, we decided to come back after dark. By boat.

Jarrett’s flat-bottomed jon boat wasn’t very big. It could hold two people comfortably and had accommodated three of us with fishing rods only with careful arrangement and balancing of bodies. After rounding up a fresh battery, we’d be able to use the trolling motor, which would be essential for the three miles of water we had to cross to reach the swampy backwater intended as our hunting ground. But that also meant a lot more weight.

We needed Jarrett on board to navigate us to and from the swamp. Lake Caddo covers more than twenty-four thousand acres and has numerous inlets, swamps, and creeks in which to get helplessly lost. Although man-made, it’s big enough and wild enough to be considered a serious candidate for Sasquatch habitat. Hundreds of Bigfoot sightings have been reported around Lake Caddo, according to the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy.

Considering the total weight and bulk of people and gear, I suggested we leave Red, the photographer, behind. That idea was not well received by Red, so we all piled into the boat, which was already filled with guns, gear, battery, and motor. We had barely three inches of freeboard between the surface of the water and the top of the boat. One good wave from a passing power boat and we could be in real trouble.

A warm breeze picked up as we quietly motored out into the middle of the lake. I sat in the bow with my shotgun, one of Michael’s magic green lasers, and a flashlight. Still far from where we could hope to spot any nutria, I flipped on the flashlight and pointed it into the water. Fish and turtles were illuminated, often only inches from my light.

Long, pale gar of two and three feet long slipped past me like reptilian ghosts. A carp looked startled and bumped into the front of the boat as it fled.

Behind me, Jeff and Jarrett chatted about guitars. Every now and then, the motor would sputter out for no apparent reason and Jarrett would fiddle with it until it got going again.

Sometimes we found ourselves within patches of giant salvinia, an invasive aquatic plant that floats on the surface in clumps. Native to Brazil, it, like so many other invasive species, is thought to have ended up in the wild after it was imported for use as an ornamental plant in aquariums and ponds. The stuff forms patches that each cover several acres on Lake Caddo; when we found ourselves entering one, we had to shut off the motor to avoid fouling the propeller. There was nothing to do except paddle manually through it. We left the open water and moved among a number of cypress trees growing up from the water. A dilapidated duck blind was built around one of them, and this marked the rough boundary of the swamp where the nutria might be found.

By this time, I was figuring out some of the behavioral patterns of the nutria on this lake. Open grassy areas like the one behind Jarrett’s cottage provide good feeding grounds but aren’t a suitable place for nutria to live. The gentle slope of the shore doesn’t provide much of an embankment to burrow into; therefore, the nutria were making a pretty long commute to feed on people’s lawns. It seemed likely that they were maintaining burrows on the steep sides of creeks and drainage canals that feed into the lake. The tracks in the mud behind Jarrett’s house were of different sizes and had been made on different days, suggesting the nutria made regular visits.

This means there were three types of places to ambush nutria: where they live, where they eat, and along the path between those places. The theory wasn’t all that different from what I’d experienced hunting whitetail deer or any other animal with predictable habits in a well-defined territory.

It would be easy to miss commuting nutria swimming across the open water, but in the closer confines of the swamps and creeks, there was less water to watch and it would be easier to spot nutria on the move. This was why we were steering the boat into the swamp.

Now considering the hunt to be on, I loaded my shotgun but kept the safety switch engaged. I had chosen the shotgun because I would probably be shooting at a moving target from a moving boat. Shotguns throw out a cloud of pellets that make it easier to intercept a moving object than it would be with, say, a single bullet from a rifle. I also carried a loaded revolver on my hip for the remote but real possibility of an alligator attack.

I turned to say something to Jeff when suddenly a flash went off from the photographer’s camera. It blinded me, and for the next few minutes I saw nothing but floating balls of light. This happened several times during the boat ride.

We slipped past a snake coiled around the branch of a cypress tree and heard a bird hooting from far away. The water grew more and more shallow. We were now in honest-to-goodness swamp with a cacophony of insects and frogs. There were little clicking sounds and cicada-like whirring and the deep honking of bullfrogs. I had seen swamps in the daytime, but never anything like this, with the promise of alligators and hundred-pound snapping turtles — maybe even Bigfoot himself. Nutria aside, I’d have been happy to spend the rest of the night just sitting there and listening to wildlife going about their business in the swamp.