Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (4 page)

The Seminole roofs and gator tours gradually gave way to a long stretch of fruit farms and palm-tree nurseries. Route 40 eventually spilled us out into the urban sprawl of Dade County. We met up with Route A1A, of Jimmy Buffett fame, which took us straight down to the Keys. The scenery segued into cheap sandal shops, boat dealers, and chintzy seafood restaurants built to look like boats.

On Big Pine Key, I stood in the office at an RV park. I handed my credit card to the woman behind the counter and subtly tried to get tips about where to hunt.

“So you have a lot of wildlife right around here, huh?”

“Oh, we’ve got the Keys deer everywhere.” She handed me a slip of paper to sign.

“What about green iguanas?” I asked. “You see any of those?”

“All the time. I get about a dozen real big ones in my backyard every day. They hang out by the pool and eat the grass. Five feet long. I love watching them out there.”

I smiled and handed her back the signed credit-card receipt. This didn’t seem like the best moment to suggest that I go to her place and shoot a bunch of enormous lizards.

The woman’s reaction represents one of the biggest impediments to managing many invasive species. Unless an animal is destroying the landscaping or eating the cat, people tend to enjoy seeing an exotic species in the backyard. Green iguanas are almost exclusively herbivorous and will not bite unless directly provoked. They’re charismatic-looking creatures, especially as juveniles. Sometimes they appear to be smiling slightly, with an almost smug look about them, as though they know something you don’t. Millions of people keep green iguanas as pets. It isn’t surprising, then, that many Floridians enjoy observing them in the wild.

The native range for green iguanas is throughout Central and South America, along with a few Caribbean islands. The climate of southern Florida is similar enough to that of these places that it’s no surprise that iguanas have thrived there as well. Local legend claims that green iguanas first came to the Keys as stowaways on ships carrying fruit from South America.

Even in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, there are stories about exotic stowaways being released into the old pink warehouse by the railroad tracks. In the 1990s, my brother lived in a cavernous apartment carved out of the top level, and the lore among the residents was that back in the 1950s they would unload bananas from the trains and store them in the warehouse. They said you had to watch out back then, because the warehouse was crawling with tarantulas, small pythons, and other creatures that had ridden on the bananas all the way from South America. If they escaped from the warehouse, they’d die when autumn arrived and the temperature dropped.

The green iguanas on the mainland were first noticed in Miami-Dade County in the 1960s. Although no one knows for sure how they arrived, many people speculate that they were either stowaways in a shipment of fruit or former pets that were released into the wild. As is often the case with an invasive species, the vector of introduction is difficult to pinpoint.

Part of the problem with green iguanas in the Keys is that they have a strong preference for eating the nicker nut, a plant that also happens to be the primary food source of the endangered Miami blue butterfly. The only remaining population of these pretty butterflies is on Bahia Honda Key, right next to Big Pine. Take away too many of the nicker nuts, and the Miami blue butterfly will become extinct. As of today, it’s been a few years since anyone has seen one.

At the RV park, my father-in-law and I set up the camper and sat at a picnic table beside it. A strong wind was coming straight off the water, which was only about thirty yards away. Somewhere out in the Caribbean, a hurricane was churning up the surf. We looked around at the omnipresent campground maintenance workers and contemplated the difficulty of the task at hand. On Gasparilla Island, I’d had the benefit of a local hunter to work with. He and I had land access and local knowledge. Down on Big Pine Key, Bob and I didn’t have any of that, but we did have a bunch of locals who thought our prey was cute.

Hunting green iguanas and most other invasive species in the Keys is legal, as long as you mind exactly where you do it. Much of Big Pine is a federal refuge for a diminutive subspecies of white-tail deer known as the Key deer. Walking around on refuge land with an air rifle is likely to get you picked up by a Fish and Wildlife officer for attempting to poach deer.

Most of the land that isn’t part of the refuge consists of residential neighborhoods, and hunting invasive species with an air rifle is perfectly legal there. Still, I’d have to expect witnesses to pitch a fit and call 911. Sure, I’d be on the right side of the law, as long as I wasn’t trespassing on private property, but this wasn’t a situation I wanted to find myself in.

For about two days we scouted. It quickly became clear that there were green iguanas everywhere; it was equally clear that I was going to have a rough time closing the deal with any of them. Most of the iguanas I was seeing were either on private property I had no access to or in spots where it would be awkward to shoot.

After spending some time cruising for green iguanas, we identified certain environments that looked like potential iguana habitat: open, grassy areas with a few shrubs, bordering thick mangroves or similar cover near water. Agile climbers as well as swimmers, green iguanas seem to prefer being close to water or thick cover or both, in order to have something to escape into. We weren’t going to be able to get any green iguanas by cruising slowly down the streets, the way I had when I was hunting for black spiny-tails with George Cera on Gasparilla Island; I would have to find a promising area and get dropped off to go in on foot, commando-style.

Back at camp, I checked off a list of supplies to bring in with me on my mission. Air rifle, check. Lead pellets, check. Binoculars, belt hatchet, water, camouflage, hunting knife, video camera, plastic bags to hold the meat, first-aid kit, and a cell phone to call for a ride upon completion of the mission: all check.

Bob drove me down a long access road that went off into the bush and eventually came to a dead end. There were no federal refuge signs and nothing that said NO TRESPASSING. He came to a stop near a place that looked as if it might be harboring iguanas, and I got out. He drove off, back toward civilization, and I melted into the mangroves as quickly as I could.

It had seemed like a good idea to wear a pair of soft-soled water shoes instead of the combat boots that I usually favor while hunting; with the swampy terrain, I figured I might end up in the water. A few dozen spike-covered seedpods poking into my bleeding soles were an excellent argument against that decision. There was nothing for it: I gingerly pulled them out, and almost as quickly acquired more.

I came upon an abandoned, boarded-up building in a clearing with grass up to my knees. This looked like green iguana territory for certain. I walked around the building and, sure enough, there was as big an iguana as I’d ever seen, lying on top of a crumbling stone wall.

Right away I backed up and crept to the corner of the building. I dropped to one knee and steadied the air rifle for a shot of about thirty yards. Remembering what I had learned from George while hunting the spiny-tails, I lined up for a brain shot. I hoped the brain of a green iguana would be in about the same part of the head as on its carnivorous relatives.

As the shot hit, the front of the iguana dropped to the other side of the wall while the back end remained visible. I jogged over to it and awkwardly attempted to reload the air rifle on my way.

The back legs still gripped the stone, but the great lizard didn’t react to my presence. It seemed as dead as a reptile can get in that short amount of time, which is admittedly not very dead. Just in case, I put another shot into the head.

It was a male, somewhere north of four feet long. There was nothing green about this green iguana. He had a magnificent reddish dewlap, and the rest of him was gray with a mottling of other colors, ending with a black-and-white-checkered tail.

Lacking ice or refrigeration in the Florida heat, I decided to butcher the iguana immediately. This lizard was much bigger than the ones we had taken on Gasparilla Island, so rather than try to chop through its heavy bones, it made sense to take it apart the same way I’d butcher a whitetail deer.

Figuring that the basic relationships between the major bones would be similar to those of deer, I made the first incisions on all four limbs from the abdominal side and then brought the cut up. This is much easier than trying to do it from the top down.

The tail proved a little trickier. It was much bigger than that of the spiny-tailed iguanas we’d worked with on Gasparilla Island. I chopped at the thick, heavy tail a few ways, then, suddenly, it dropped off on its own, disconnecting right where I’d wanted it to. The disembodied tail twitched and thrashed for a moment and then lay still. I looked at the open cut and saw a smooth, W-shaped mass of muscle.

I assumed that this reaction was the result of two things: the slow death process a lizard goes through (which hadn’t at that point reached the tail) and that, like many other species of lizard, the green iguana is capable of dropping off its tail when attacked. The predator is distracted by the thrashing tail and can even eat it as a consolation prize, and the lizard escapes to live another day and eventually grow another tail. Sometimes more than one tail grows from the stump.

As a child reading books about natural history, I had often wondered whether the tail dropping was voluntary. Now, seeing that big green iguana release its tail when its brain was defunct and the remains were half-butchered suggested a reflex that doesn’t rely on a functioning central nervous system. I was intrigued.

I put the limbs and tail into a plastic bag and stuffed it into my backpack. I threw the head and torso into the brush to feed the scavengers, although later I regretted not saving the entire hide to preserve as a curiosity.

I hunted a little longer before deciding to quit while I was ahead, and called Bob to come and get me. We were going to try our hand at cooking up the iguana. I had all of the ingredients to make a pasta sauce, so I figured we’d make some iguana pasta for dinner that evening.

Our cooking venue — the kitchenette of the pop-up camper — was quite a bit more cramped than the kitchen on Gasparilla Island where Greg Beano was showing us how to make iguana tacos. It also had limited facilities: a three-burner gas range and only the most basic utensils.

The hide of a large green iguana is thick and strong; it would be great material for making belts, books, knife sheaths, perhaps even for backing a traditional wooden bow. Unfortunately, the easiest way to skin a lizard to get at the meat — by parboiling it — pretty much ruins the hide, so I decided to try a different method. With a pocketknife, I skinned each limb by making a short incision from the cut end. Then I stuck the gut hook of my hunting knife into that incision and pulled it down to the reptile’s foot. This gave me access to the length of the inside, and I had two sides of hide to pull apart. This worked all right on the limbs, but the tail was a real piece of work; that hide was very tightly attached to the flesh and just wouldn’t come off. I had to continually work the blade along every bit of hide.

Because the meat is all in the tail and legs, gutting is unnecessary. This means that an iguana is actually easier to butcher than poultry is. Iguana is much easier to process than fish is, too; there are far fewer bones. I carved the raw flesh from the bones with a small knife, minced it on a cutting board (for lack of a meat grinder in my bare-bones kitchen), and sautéed it in olive oil with a little garlic. I whipped up a basic American-style ragout sauce using the iguana meat as a substitute for the more common beef or pork.

Like its spiny-tailed cousin, green iguana turns out to taste pretty much like chicken. Late that night, Bob and I finished our plates of spaghetti and iguana sauce and walked the dozen or so yards to the ocean with our fishing rods and some beer. The wind blew in from a tropical storm that was brewing a few hundred miles out. I cast my line into the moonlit water and wondered what would happen if even a fraction of the recreational fishermen in Florida took up iguana hunting as a pastime.

It’s not an easy state in which to hunt: The same swampy tangle of vegetation that hid those last Seminoles won’t give up invasive green iguanas any more readily. With a few more hunters, though, we might be able to at least hold them at bay, to provide a few places for plants like the nicker nut to grow and for species like the Miami blue butterfly to continue to exist. If Floridians could learn to eat the iguanas in their own backyards, it would make a very real difference.

Pigs and Armadillos