Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (2 page)

It’s quite an emotional leap to make, especially for those of us who didn’t grow up hunting and fishing, but it’s one that can be made, with practice and experience. As a professional hunting instructor who teaches adult beginners and grew up in a vegetarian household, I have a lot of sympathy for people who are slowly warming up to the idea of killing for food. Understand, though, that the skills and tools I describe throughout this book can be acquired, and it’s possible to overcome the normal reluctance to, for example, gut and scale a fish.

Part of what makes this leap possible is the realization that you’re playing a part in helping to fix an ecological disaster in progress. If you can do this, you’ll feel better about your place in the world. Your food will have a deeper meaning than the price tag and calorie count, and you’ll value the time you spent outdoors in pursuit of it. Making the leap changed my life, and it could change yours, too.

While writing this book, I spent about sixteen months traveling around the United States and the Caribbean, hunting and fishing for invasive species. The process didn’t happen quite the way that I’d expected it would, however. Not every species turned out to be the problem that it had been made out to be; at the same time, I ran into other invasive species I’d had no idea were even out there.

In the beginning, I thought I was hitting the road simply to find and eat invasive wildlife. It usually turned out that the bigger issues were with human beings. Human activity has caused the introduction of many invasive species that threaten the survival of native wildlife. Every invasive species is native somewhere, and in most cases that is the place where we should have left it.

Black Spiny-Tailed Iguanas

“I wish I never had to kill another living thing,” George remarked, a serious look on his broad, suntanned face. “There’s nothing good about having to do any of this. But I know that for every ctenosaur I shoot, I’m saving hundreds of other native animals. The only thing worse than having to kill sixteen thousand iguanas would be watching all of these other animals go extinct.”

To paraphrase Noël Coward, the only creatures foolish enough to venture out in the midday sun in the tropics are mad dogs and Englishmen. Not fitting into either of these categories, I nevertheless found myself in the Florida sun at noon, on Gasparilla Island, improbably riding shotgun in a golf cart while hiding a pellet rifle under my backpack as we drove past the vacation home of George W. Bush’s brother Marvin. There was, in fact, an Englishman (a journalist named Jeff Latham) sitting in the backseat, but no mad dogs were in sight. Our prey was the black spiny-tailed iguana.

The golf cart was piloted by George Cera, professional hunter and trapper of nuisance animals. George likes to refer to the spiny-tail as a “ctenosaur” (TEEN-a-sore), which makes sense for two reasons. First, it’s close to the animal’s Latin name —
Ctenosaura similis.
Second, the word
ctenosaur
makes it sound like we’re talking about a dinosaur. Once you’ve seen a ctenosaur up close, you’ll find the comparison to be apt. Its scaly head, sharp teeth, and short crest along the top of its back make it look like something from the Jurassic period.

The spiny-tailed iguana is a distant relative of the better-known green iguana, which is frequently kept as a pet. Their silhouettes are somewhat similar in profile, but the black-and- gray coloring of the adult spiny-tailed iguana immediately sets it apart. The two are further differentiated by their eating habits. The green is almost exclusively an herbivore; the spiny-tail is an omnivore. Although it’s happy to eat leaves, buds, and fruit, it will pounce on almost anything that moves and is small enough to swallow. Because the male tops out at almost five feet long , quite a lot of things are small enough for it to ingest.

The spiny-tail is well equipped to have its way with other creatures. Its weaponry consists chiefly of a row of very sharp front teeth, which are angled steeply back into the mouth to hold on to whatever it can grab. If the teeth haven’t convinced an opponent to either run away or get into the ctenosaur’s belly, the four sets of pointed black talons should be persuasive. If the thing isn’t worth trying to eat, the sharp scutes — horny scales — along the tail turn it into a formidable whip that the lizard can and will use in combat. Those scutes are sharp enough that they can draw blood even when the lizard is dead. If the fight doesn’t seem to be going the spiny-tail’s way, it can instantly disconnect its own tail and leave the wriggling, disembodied member as a distraction while it makes its escape.

The spiny-tail also uses its weaponry to claim its living space. It likes to sleep and hide in holes, and will dig one for itself if it must, but it prefers one that some other animal has already dug, and then “makes arrangements” for its use. That often consists of biting the hell out of its former owner. If possible, the invader will eat the occupant and its offspring.

The spiny-tailed iguanas on Gasparilla Island are descended from a handful that were deliberately released by an exotic-pet owner who was no longer willing to take care of them. A very apologetic gentleman has admitted to being the culprit about thirty years ago. At the time, he’d had no idea what he was unleashing on the island. This is a confession that has, unfortunately, been repeated with many different species by pet owners in Florida. An animal may become too large or aggressive to care for, or perhaps the owner is moving to a place that prohibits pets. Unwilling to euthanize what was a pet, the owner releases it in a patch of woods and hopes for the best.

If this were to happen in New Jersey, say, that lizard or snake or other exotic animal would probably have an exciting summer before falling asleep on a cold day in October or November and never waking up. In a subtropical environment like Florida’s, an exotic pet from Africa or South America might very well live to reproduce.

Initially, the iguanas were a novel delight to watch creeping around gardens, and they became a constant presence on every block of Boca Grande (the town in which we were hunting). In typical human fashion, most of the town’s residents decided this was a problem only when the iguanas actually began to
devour
their gardens. By the time I came to Gasparilla Island, many plants hadn’t flowered in years; the spiny-tails can easily climb even the tallest plants and eat the flower buds before they open. This problem prompted the town officials of Boca Grande to hire George. What he found when he started hunting the iguanas was something far more sinister than damage to ornamental plants.

George, Jeff, and I drove a few blocks farther, occasionally slowing down as we passed empty vacation homes where George had permission to hunt iguanas. Even though it was legal to carry a pellet rifle and shoot iguanas, we tried to keep the gun out of sight: You never know when some tourist will overreact, call the police, and create a messy situation that wastes everyone’s time. We paused for a few minutes in front of a large yard to watch a pair of big males sunning themselves. George put a hand on his pellet rifle but didn’t shoulder it. Suddenly, one of the lizards leapt into the air at a shocking speed and grabbed what looked to be a small brown anole (a smaller species of lizard) off the side of a stump. That’s another thing about spiny-tailed iguanas: They hold the record as the fastest lizards on the planet.

The electric cart squeaked to a stop in front of a broad empty lot, and Jeff and I hopped out. Jeff happened to be writing a story about George at the same time I’d arrived to go hunting with him. I suppose Jeff might have expected to spend a few days doing interviews and taking a few pictures, but the morning he walked through George’s front door, we hustled him out into the cart to come hunting with us.

We approached a half-moon-shaped hole in the ground, and I noted the spiderwebs across the top of the hole, which, I surmised aloud, indicated that nothing large could be living there at the moment. As we looked around for the probable occupant of the hole, Jeff spotted a surprisingly large gopher tortoise staring at us from the dappled sunlight under a tree. The tortoise looked at each of us in turn, seemingly unafraid and already bored with us. (I suppose if you’ve been facing down big, black-and-gray lizards with teeth like those of a prehistoric crocodile for the last ten years, you’re not likely to be easily scared off.) After a minute, it ambled into the hole I’d insisted was uninhabited.

In Florida, the native gopher tortoise is a keystone species — that is, a plant or animal that many other species depend on for survival. It happens to be a keystone for some three hundred other species. It digs holes up to forty feet long, in locations that don’t tend to cause erosion or environmental damage but that do provide homes for many other animals. There are also fruits, such as the gopher apple and the saw palmetto, that the gopher tortoise helps to reproduce. It spreads the seeds in its droppings, thus aiding propagation. The gopher tortoise tends to excrete seeds intact and ready to germinate more often than do many of the other animals that eat the same fruit.

We saw many gopher tortoises during the three days I spent in Boca Grande, but none of them had a shell smaller than about seven or eight inches long. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why: The iguanas were eating all of the eggs and hatchlings before they could grow large enough to be safe from most predation. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that if this keeps up, the species will disappear from the island.

Other species are in danger as well. George told me he once witnessed a nest of baby scrub jays (an endangered species) being cleaned out by an iguana. By the time he returned to the nest with a pellet rifle, it was too late. It isn’t known how many species of bird are at risk to spiny-tail predation; the research simply hasn’t been done. Given that this lizard is equally comfortable in treetops and in underground tunnels, a wide variety of bird species could be in grave danger of extinction.

On our second day of cruising the streets and culs-de-sac of Boca Grande, it was my turn to shoot. In Florida, no special license is required to hunt animals that are designated as nuisance species, and the air rifles we were using are exempt from the prohibitions on discharging a firearm in town. At first, it seemed absurd to refer to cruising around in a golf cart as hunting. But after having shot iguanas with George, I can honestly say that this qualified. There’s a knack to it. Understanding what type of environmental “structure” (types of plants and proximity to hiding places, for example) the lizards prefer is most of the challenge.

Positively identifying one is a challenge; after a while,
everything
started to look like an iguana: shadows, sticks, even figments of my imagination. George’s trick is to stop looking for an iguana. Instead, he looks for something that doesn’t belong: a shape or a shadow that doesn’t quite fit with patterns in the landscape. Sometimes that shape is a chunk of palm-tree bark on the ground; at other times it’s the broken end of a branch protruding from one of the banyan trees that have turned several streets on the island into haunting, leafy caves. And every now and then, it just might be a big invasive lizard.

These days, it’s less likely that the out-of-place shadow will prove to be a spiny-tail. That’s because George has single-handedly killed more than sixteen thousand of the lizards on Gasparilla. Some lucky town employee was assigned to count the fruits of George’s bounty from a ripe-smelling trash can at the end of every day. By the time I arrived, the once-booming population had been reduced to a relatively few adults and a great many of the diminutive green juveniles: enough to bring back the problem in a big way in just a few years, if the hunting pressure lets up.

We cruised around looking for my first kill. It was early in the day and the action was slow. Iguanas don’t seem to be out and about reliably until between noon and 1 p.m. A pickup truck passed us heading the other way and George glared at it.

“USDA guys,” George said, furrowing the brow of his shaved head. “Those guys have no frickin’ clue what they’re doing. Nothing but a pain in my ass. Guess how many lizards they take, on average, each day they’re out there.”

He shifted his bulk in the seat to stare at them.

“Seven.” He answered his own question, disgusted.

“And how many were you taking right before the town put them in charge?” I asked.

“Around thirty.”

I couldn’t imagine what the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be doing in a small town on an island fueled by the businesses of tourism and tarpon fishing, with nary a farm or ranch in sight.