Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (19 page)

To compound the problem, because so many natural predators have disappeared, the survival rate among goslings is much higher than what can be sustained without an impact on the local environment. Three hundred years ago, a pair of geese were probably lucky to have one or two survivors among their young each year, to follow them on their migration. Today it’s not uncommon for half a dozen goslings to mature out of a clutch of suburban resident geese.

Thus, instead of a pond surrounded by forest, hosting a pair of geese that show up every year, stay awhile to raise a few goslings, then migrate, now that pond ecosystem (surrounded by grass and urbanization) must endure the presence of dozens of adult geese year-round — geese that eat the vegetation and poop it into the water, causing bacterial blooms and algal explosions.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m delighted that the giant Canada goose dodged a bullet and hasn’t gone extinct. But enough is enough. There are too many of them in places where they don’t belong. And, just as with other invasive species wreaking havoc, this situation was caused by humans. As a human being myself, I see it as our collective responsibility to fix what we broke.

One remedy is to eat the invaders. Geese could easily be a delectable food source; each one contains from three to fifteen pounds of meat. Giant Canada geese are plentiful and ubiquitous. Somehow, though, people have trouble seeing them as food.

I had hunted and cooked Canada geese before, and knew they make for good eating. Then, one summer, I read an article in the
New York Times
explaining that the resident geese of Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, would be rounded up, gassed, and deposited in a landfill. I was furious. Killing any animal is a serious thing, and the
wasteful
killing of anything is reprehensible. Using something as food at least gives meaning to its death.

The cull of Prospect Park’s geese didn’t come out of the blue. On January 15, 2009, a US Airways passenger jet hit a flock of geese and several birds were sucked into the engines, causing total engine failure. Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger landed the plane on the Hudson River, saving the lives of all one hundred and fifty-five souls on board. It was called “the miracle on the Hudson,” and rightfully recognized as a testament to good leadership and the human spirit.

While the rest of the United States was celebrating Captain Sullenberger, the Federal Aviation Administration started examining the goose situation that had caused not only the failure of Sully’s engines but also several other accidents. Although isotope analysis was not able to determine conclusively whether the geese were migratory or resident, the FAA decided it was time to act.

It pushed for a cull of hundreds of thousands of geese in New York, especially around airports. Although other bird species result in a greater overall percentage of bird strikes, Canada geese are so big that they’re considered more destructive to an engine in midflight. The FAA partnered with the USDA to study the possibility of reducing the numbers of geese on the ground near airports. The USDA began work on behalf of New York City–area airports by rounding up the geese of Prospect Park in an unannounced raid.

Throwing perfectly good goose meat into a landfill rubbed me the wrong way, so I decided to do something about it. I e-mailed my contacts at Slow Food NYC, for whom I had recently conducted a series of events, with an offer to put on a “Slow Geese” workshop, in which I would speak about the issue of geese while cooking and serving wild goose. If the state of New York did not believe that wild Canada goose was edible, then I would prove it by offering a plate to anyone who cared to try it.

Slow Food is an international organization devoted to the antithesis of fast food. Founded in Italy, it comprises hundreds of “convivia” (a fancy word for “chapters”) in cities around the world. Members are dedicated to preserving traditional foodways and ingredients. Such as wild geese. Doing a Slow Geese presentation in the wake of the miracle on the Hudson made sense.

My friends at Slow Food agreed, and set a date in late October. They even booked a venue in Brooklyn within walking distance of Prospect Park. All I had to do was show up with some wild giant Canada goose to cook with a skilled chef and be prepared to talk to a bunch of Brooklynites about how they could become locavore hunters and get some geese of their own.

Now I just needed to bag a few geese; after all, I couldn’t do a cooking demo without the main ingredient. Like many other states, Virginia has a special September goose season with generous limits. In September, any migratory geese haven’t arrived yet, so it’s a safe assumption that any goose killed is a resident.

There are three primary strategies for hunting the Canada goose: hunting from a blind, pass shooting, and jump shooting.

Hunting from a blind is the approach most people are familiar with. First the hunter builds a blind near a large body of water. He (or she) then spreads an array of floating decoys on the surface of the water. The hunter is awake at a ridiculously early hour and ready in his blind, freezing his butt off, waiting for sunrise.

I’ve never engaged in that type of goose hunting: I like to sleep late, thanks. Nor can I afford the dozens of decoy geese this approach requires.

However, I have a lot of experience with the other types of goose hunting. Pass shooting is easy and fun. Rather than spending twenty dollars on a goose call, I practice making its sound with my own voice. I’ve had excellent success calling in flocks of geese with nothing but my hand and my mouth. I look for a big field with relatively short grass, which is where geese usually land to graze during September and October. (Geese won’t commit to landing in tall grass, for fear of lurking predators, such as you.) I wait there until I hear geese honking in the distance. Most of the time I don’t bother to hide — nonmigratory geese in my area are rarely hunted and so are wonderfully unsophisticated. If I imitate the call well, they’ll fly straight in for me, and I ready myself to shoot as they descend.

The third type of goose hunting, called jump shooting, is the practice of finding a place where geese are already on the ground, scaring them at close range, and then shooting them as they fly off. This can be done on land or along water, though on water is more common.

I’d done plenty of pass shooting and jump shooting for geese on ponds, so I decided to try jump shooting on a river to bag my New York City–bound geese. The Rivanna River, which is close to my home in Albemarle County, Virginia, flows past several high-end housing developments whose residents complain vociferously about the geese yet wring their hands about the ethics of hunting. I thought I’d enjoy shooting a few geese as I floated in a canoe past the reflections of their enormous and expensive homes. As long as I was on the river, I’d be within the law.

So there I was, in a canoe on the river, once again accompanied by my father-in-law, Bob. We thought these resident geese would be so accustomed to being fed bread by hand that we’d be able to get close to them before they spooked. In practice, though, this isn’t what happened.

The geese seemed to know the difference between guys in a canoe on a river with shotguns and, say, parents and their children on a pond with a loaf of bread. We would round a bend, spot some geese, and start paddling, and they’d take off before a shot was fired. After a few miles of this, I decided that rounding the bend was the problem. The canoe was too visible during that final approach.

To improve things, Bob and I stopped on a sandbar near the next serious bend in the river. Then, I could move as stealthily as possible on foot to see if there were geese waiting on the other side. We went many miles, stopping at various spits of land so I could test my theory.

At last, it worked. I left the boat and stepped cautiously and quietly, as though hunting deer, in my felt-soled water shoes. Heel to toe, each step. I parted the grass and peered over at a flock of several dozen geese on the water very nearby.

This presented a dilemma. Conventional “Marquess of Queensbury” rules of hunting waterfowl state that one must never ever shoot at a duck or goose on the water or on land (this is convention — not law). A hunter is supposed to wait until the goose has started to fly away before opening fire. As a public advocate for hunting for food and for removing invasive species, I never thought of myself as particularly concerned with that sort of thing. After all, the idea isn’t to make it “sporting”; it’s to solve an ecological problem. Yet I had absorbed too much of the traditional ethic. I stood there with my twelve-gauge Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun in my hands and couldn’t will myself to shoot at these geese on the water.

Okay, something had to be done.

“Hey, geese!” I yelled.

That did it. The flock beat their wings and launched their heavy, plant-eating bodies into the air. I picked out the closest one and squeezed the trigger. The bird dropped and I picked out another and shot it as well. I looked for a third within range, but they were higher now and passing the treetops. And then they were simply gone.

I looked back at the water for my geese and saw both of them swimming hard. I had hit them but not well enough, as they could still at least swim, if not fly. There was nothing for it but to go after them, gun and all. That’s the beauty of hunting with an inexpensive pump-action shotgun: You can get it wet and dirty, and it will usually take a beating and live to shoot another day, even if it is a little uglier for the experience. And if it breaks, you can just buy another one.

I dived into the water and swam after the escaping birds. The ground level dropped quickly and soon I was in deep water. I felt mud under my feet again after a while and used the butt of the shotgun as a sort of bargepole to push myself off the bottom and advance more quickly. I floated down rapids and spun through white water that would have been minor in a canoe or kayak but posed a lot more trouble on foot with a shotgun in tow. Never did my Outward Bound white-water training serve me better.

The geese began to lose ground — not so much because of my prowess with a shotgun in white water but rather because they’d been shot with said shotgun, which is why they were swimming and not in flight. Had I been hit with the same dose of steel shot, I’d have dropped out long ago.

I caught up with the first goose and prepared to finish it off with the gun before realizing that:

A) This shotgun and its ammunition had just swum down a quarter mile of white water and might not shoot at all.

B) Even if it did manage to go
bang,
at a range of less than three yards there wouldn’t be anything left to eat.

I drew closer to the angry, hissing goose and remembered that, as always, I had a knife in my pocket. The blade came out and the goose and I were
mano-a
-wing briefly before
mano
won the day and the goose was subjugated. Then I came up on the other goose on the opposite bank. It fought harder and I couldn’t get the knife close to its neck. Dropping the knife, I grabbed the goose with both hands and dragged it under the water until neither of us could bear it any longer. I rose and took a breath, but the goose was dead.

More-experienced goose hunters have told me that what I just described is never, ever supposed to happen. Rather, expensive and well-trained retrievers are supposed to see to everything after the first few shots hit. I don’t understand why these hunters are letting the dogs have all the adventure.

With the geese in hand, I was able to do the goose-cuisine demonstration in Brooklyn just before Halloween. I took Amtrak from Charlottesville to Manhattan with my frozen geese thawing in my suitcase. I stayed in Brooklyn, on my friend Caroline’s couch. We painted the town red on the eve of the goose event; we must have had at least two drinks at every brownstone between the East Village and Park Slope. I fell asleep on the floor with one of her cats on my head, maybe two hours before I had to wake up.

Caroline managed to get me up and out of the apartment on time by pouring coffee down my throat. I was almost human when I checked in to the kitchen at a culinary learning center and dropped the geese on the counter for my friend Leighton to start prepping. I stumbled into the bathroom there and stared at myself in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes. Dark circles. At least I’d miraculously managed to shave.

Somehow, when I was about to start my presentation, forty-five minutes later, I’d been cured of the hangover from hell. The moment it was time to start talking, I came to life and found myself running at one hundred percent. Good thing, too; we had a full house.

I carved up the geese, then talked about hunting and butchering while Leighton cooked. Leighton bears more than a passing resemblance to Jeff Bridges’s character, the Dude, from the film
The Big Lebowski.
The goose meat came out perfectly. Our audience enjoyed it enough that whatever scraps remained were claimed afterward. One older gentleman wanted a neck for stock, a young woman took home a spare goose breast, and one guy asked for all of the feet. I haven’t the slightest idea what anyone would want with goose feet, but I gave them to him.

People seem to have two ideas in their heads about eating geese. First, there’s a vaguely Dickensian image of an all-afternoon ordeal required to produce one meal (generally at Christmas). Even if goose tastes all right, the feeling is that you have to spend all day to get there. Other people believe wild goose will taste gamy and be tough, and isn’t worth bothering with.