Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (5 page)

Human beings have left a trail of swine around the world. European explorers and colonists took pigs with them pretty much everywhere they went. Being particularly clever animals, pigs have the habit of escaping from captivity. As highly adaptable omnivores, they can survive and reproduce just about anywhere, making them one of the most widespread invasive species in the world.

Their release was often deliberate, on islands in particular. When Captain James Cook set out on his first voyage of exploration, he brought a large supply of pigs and goats to release on suitable islands, in order to provide a source of food for future stops by naval vessels. To trace his route around the world is to follow a series of ecological tragedies that continue to unfold as the descendants of Cook’s livestock eat their way through native habitats.

When I got it into my head to hunt pigs, I started on Back Bay, which amounts to a barrier island connected to the mainland of Virginia by a narrow spit of land. The pigs of Back Bay are the descendants of escaped domestic swine. Although no one knows how long the pigs have been on the island, they’re thought to have escaped about a hundred years ago.

With Bob, my father-in-law, again along for the ride, I drove to a campground a few miles from the Back Bay Wildlife Refuge. We took a cabin for the night or, rather, for a very small fraction thereof. There are a lot of rules about hunting Back Bay, and one of them is that everyone needs to be at the gate to sign in by four in the morning.

More rules: Shotguns only. No rifles, no muzzleloaders, no pistols, no bait. No spotlighting. No hunting outside of your assigned zone, on pain of arrest. The borders between zones won’t be visible, so you’ll just have to avoid moving around too much. No scouting, except in designated areas on special days. No gutting or quartering your pigs, either. The refuge staff wants to examine the stomach contents and take samples. If you happen to shoot a three-hundred-pound animal two miles from the nearest road or trail, lots of luck getting it out of there. If a hunter from a neighboring zone helps you carry out your pig, he is now outside his zone and subject to arrest. State law requires that you carry your hunting license at all times while hunting, but the federal employees who manage this wildlife preserve require that all licenses be held at the desk while hunters are hunting, meaning that you’re damned either way if someone in a uniform decides he doesn’t like you. There’s more: No walking on the beach. No shooting from any vehicle or boat.

The rules for hunting Back Bay probably give visiting hours at Folsom Prison a run for their money.

Bob and I found ourselves in a large, garagelike building waiting to check in before dawn. A few dozen hunters milled around in mismatched camouflage and blaze orange. They were all men, of various ages. Some stood in line in front of a row of folding tables, hunting licenses and signed papers in their hands. Others clustered in front of boards that showed how many pigs and deer had been taken from each zone on different days.

A parade of bureaucratic messes erupted between would-be hunters and the wildlife reserve employees. Hunters in their mid-sixties who had previously been told by game wardens that they were legally exempt from the requirement to present a hunter’s education certificate were turned away. Tempers flared. The Fish and Wildlife officer, a frustrated-looking man in his late thirties, tried to keep order. It quickly became clear that he didn’t know anything about Virginia’s hunting regulations. In fact, he even declared that I would not be permitted to carry a weapon into the field, on account of missing paperwork. Bob and I briefly considered heading home but decided that Bob could carry his shotgun and I’d come along, unarmed, to help out.

The tension in the room between the hunters and the staff grew palpable as more hunters were given information that contradicted what they had been told before arriving. The Fish and Wildlife officer promised to check with a representative from the state wildlife agency about hunting regulations, and then reported back that nothing was going to change. I became curious as to who this state representative was. . . .

Finally, they hustled us all into open-sided shuttle vehicles that resembled the parking trams at Disney World. We were driven in total darkness and dropped off at spots that may or may not have been within our proper zones.

Bob and I stood in the middle of a gravel road as the red lights on the back of our vehicle disappeared into the distance. The ground was sodden from a recent heavy rain. We knew the dunes we needed to hunt were somewhere off to our left and that we had to get out to them before the sun came up. Pigs tend to go nocturnal when they’ve been hunted, and because hunting at night was forbidden, we needed to be in position for the first thirty minutes or so of daylight before the pigs were gone for the day. If you’ve got to hunt a nocturnal creature during the daytime, your best bet is to catch up with it at either the beginning or the end of its shift.

Getting to the dunes seemed essential. There, we’d be able to set up on a ridge or on the side of a dune with a view commanding a wide, open area. Everywhere else, there was too much vegetation and thus no visibility.

Our trouble was figuring out exactly how to get to where we wanted to be. In this restricted-access area, there were few hiking trails to follow. Nor had we been permitted to scout our zone in daylight before our arrival. The only thing we could do was to start walking straight for our destination and deal with whatever was in our way as best we could.

Lots of things tend to get in your way in the coastal swamps of Virginia. We made an initial effort to hop from hummock to hummock of grass in the flooded meadows near the road. But soon the water was deep enough that we went in up to our knees.

Bob began cursing up a storm, and I begged him to quiet down. We needed to be at least a little stealthy on our approach. His low-top hiking boots flooded much more quickly than did my water-resistant army boots. At least it was cold enough that we didn’t need to worry about snakes. Not much, anyway. In addition to pigs, Back Bay is notable for representing the northernmost point of the range of the cottonmouth (also known as the water moccasin). We just hoped it would be too cold for any to be active.

Things turned ugly once we got into the bush. A wicked maze of thorns and low-branched bushes stood in our way, intermingled with fallen trees from past storms. I pulled out a pair of garden pruners from my pack and began clipping my way through the scrub. It was rough, but I knew it was unlikely that any thorns would kill me. In fact, I must confess to taking a certain bizarre pleasure in wading through the worst sorts of swamps and briars when circumstances call for it. There’s a kind of freedom in being soaked to the bone, filthy, and scratched all to hell. Maybe it’s because, barring a calamity, things aren’t likely to get any worse.

Bob, on the other hand, pointed out that he was a good six inches taller than I am and roughly two hundred years older. It was a lot more difficult for him to get through the route I was taking. Within ten minutes of pushing through the scrub, he refused to go any farther, and we turned around to find another way to our destination.

In chronological years, Bob is only about twenty-five years older. He studied field biology in college before switching to major in wildlife illustration. He did the illustrations for my last book. It’s handy being able to cart around your illustrator with you on the road; all you have to do is promise him all kinds of fishing and wild pigs and some adventures.

After wading across what can best be described as a shallow pond and walking a mile or so through marsh grasses, we found what may have once been an access road to the dunes, but which had been flooded by the recent rain. Because we were already soaked, we slogged down the long, narrow marsh into the general area of the tertiary dunes.

The dunes were crisscrossed with pig tracks and signs of their rooting. This is one of the problems with wild swine in a habitat like this; they dig through the dunes to eat sand crabs and the roots of some of the plants that hold the dunes together. The fear is that this action, over time, will lead to the destruction of those dunes and perhaps to the disappearance of the entire landmass into the sea.

It was clear that there had been pigs out here all night. Set yourself up in the dark on one of those ridges with a rifle and a spotlight, and you’d have no trouble knocking the population down. But that isn’t allowed, despite the absence of any houses to worry about hitting. I wondered why.

It was a beautiful place. There aren’t many spots here on the East Coast where you can walk among the dunes by the ocean without seeing a trace of humans. Instead there were sea oats and raccoon tracks and the thick smell of salt and scrub pines and a touch of honest seaside decay on the wind.

After an hour and a half of ambush and a few attempts to drive any hidden pigs out of the brush and into Bob’s line of fire, we packed it in. Hunting pigs in a place like this, in the middle of the day, was turning out to be a fool’s errand. As their tracks showed us, once the sun was well up in the sky, the pigs moved down into the same tangled mess of thorns and scrub that had turned us back initially. Visibility in that environment is limited to five or six feet, and it would be impossible to kill the pigs there without baiting them into an ambush.

We were required to check out of the wildlife preserve at the same utility building where we had checked in. I asked one of the rangers if anyone had taken a pig. She said no. A uniformed man whom I hadn’t seen before was seated behind one of the folding tables, and he mentioned that someone had brought in a nice deer.

Looking closer at his uniform, I saw that he wasn’t with Fish and Wildlife. He looked to be about my age, maybe a little older. I walked over to talk to him.

“Say, are you the biologist here to take samples of the pigs when people bring them in?”

“Yeah, when anyone has one for us. We don’t have any yet today.”

“What do you look for when one comes in?”

“Any kind of disease that might affect the native wildlife — brucellosis, that sort of thing.”

“Well, if you did find a disease like that, what would you do?”

The biologist laughed. “Well, that’s the question, all right. We’re not really sure. We have a budget to study the pigs, but it can’t be used for eradication.”

“You’re with the USDA?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re here to help figure out how to get rid of the pigs?”

“We’re trying to.”

“So what’s the plan, aside from the managed hunts like what’s happening today?”

“It’s just these hunts for now.”

“How many pigs do you figure are here right now?”

“Probably about three hundred, just within the refuge borders.”

“How many did you kill last year, among all of the hunters you had out here for all of the managed hunts?”

“Fifteen.”

“Only fifteen?”

The USDA guy sighed and shrugged. “Yeah, I know. With pigs, we need to be knocking out at least seventy-five percent of the population each year just to keep their numbers steady. They have so many litters every year.”

From what Bob and I had just experienced, it wasn’t hugely surprising that so few pigs had been killed. By not allowing hunters to check out the territory in advance, the people from Fish and Wildlife were just dropping people off in the dark (literally and figuratively), letting them wander around and essentially educate the pigs. Hunters never had a chance to pattern the pigs or predict where they’d be.

The more I thought about it, the more I imagined how things could be done differently. If the USDA would stop having these big cattle calls that bring out guys like me and just find a few local hunters (as Boca Grande had done in hiring George Cera to deal with their iguana situation), it would be a much better situation. The hunters could be vetted, put through some sort of short ecology course, and given twenty-four-hour access to the property, year-round, with whatever weapons they wanted. Then there’d be hunters who’d get to know where the pigs were at any given time and they could really start killing them.

I mentioned this idea to the USDA guy.

“We can’t let people come in here year-round to hunt,” he said. “It would be a safety hazard for the researchers.”

“What researchers?”

“The people studying the effects of the pigs on the habitat.”

When I was in college, fifteen years ago, I actually did fieldwork on the pigs of the Back Bay and gathered data on the damage the pigs were doing to the local ecosystem. I wondered what the USDA still needed to learn after fifteen years that they hadn’t already observed. The pigs were clearly a problem and needed to be hunted to keep their numbers in check.

“We don’t have much of an eradication budget,” the USDA guy said, “but we do have a pretty good budget to study the problem. If we don’t use the research budget this year, then we won’t get it next year.”

Essentially, people couldn’t come in to shoot the invasive species, because that would present a danger to the people who were there to study the invasive species. And they couldn’t just stop the studies, because then they wouldn’t get the money to keep, well, studying it.

As it turned out, the guy was actually a biologist with the USDA, on loan to the state game department for the hunt, and didn’t know any of the state hunting regulations. Suddenly it became all too clear why the morning sign-ups were such a mess. The feds had lent their man to the state, and he was now nominally representing the state to the feds as they hashed out state hunting-license issues. Except that none of them had any idea what the others were talking about.