Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (7 page)

Following up on a wounded pig in thick cover is a whole other deal. You aren’t likely to see the pig and have a shot opportunity until you’re only a few feet away. Keep in mind that these animals typically grow to around three hundred pounds and that they usually have very sharp tusks up to three or four inches long. When you consider that there’s an entire herd of them waiting and that they are very angry at you, this is not a situation you should put yourself into without having secured a life-insurance policy that defines the word
suicide
in language that you and your heirs are comfortable with.

It was Daniel’s show and we were playing by his rules, so after searching the perimeter of the field for an hour or so, we called off the chase and returned to the truck.

We took a detour on our way out. Daniel steered his truck to the bottom of a gentle hill and parked beside an electric fence. I got out and walked over to the fence to look at what amounted to an open-air graveyard for anything dead on the farm. There were huge cattle skeletons with pelvises that looked big enough to crawl through, and damp masses of gray hair clinging to the desiccated remains of what had been a coyote (a newly invasive species in eastern states). The bones of feral pigs were scattered everywhere. I picked up a lower jaw to which the long fangs were still attached and slipped it into my pocket.

Looking at the size of the boneyard, I asked Daniel how many pigs he’d killed here in the last year.

“About sixty,” he said.

Sixty pigs. Killed by one guy, hunting in his spare time, with essentially no budget.

A medium-size boar lay on its side with its mouth open and legs stiff. Shot only yesterday, it was still intact. People don’t often eat wild boars; the uncastrated males can have a funky flavor that most people don’t like. The shoats and sows are said to make for better eating.

Daniel said he figured this old boy was somewhere between two hundred and fifty and three hundred pounds. I reached out and felt the stiff black bristles on its back. The animal resembled a domestic pig but with a little more hair and a thicker hide than what you’d find in a pigpen. It was black all over.

Judging by their appearance, it’s likely that the pigs around Perry haven’t been there all that long: just a couple of decades, I would guess. The longer pigs are out in the wild, the more they resemble their wild Eurasian ancestors over the course of generations. The pigs here could be escapees from a commercial pig farm, or perhaps they had been released by people who wanted to hunt them eventually; that happens sometimes. In some cases in which domestic pigs have already escaped to the wild, people have released some wild European stock to interbreed with them. Russian razorbacks are a favorite for this purpose. The pigs I saw around Perry showed no signs of having such blood, fortunately.

The night felt like a success of sorts, even though we hadn’t bagged a pig. I’d seen our prey in the wild and been offered a shot, and I knew for sure that Daniel knew what he was doing. We were dog-tired and hungry, and Daniel had a day job to show up for in a matter of hours. We adjourned for the night.

We got to our motel at dawn, and Bob and I ate either breakfast or a late dinner, depending on how you figure it at the local Waffle House. Utterly exhausted, I should have gone straight to sleep, but I kept thinking about the armadillo Daniel had taken a shot at. I pulled out my laptop and started doing some homework.

What I found made me want to add armadillos to my hunting list. All nine-banded armadillos found north of the Rio Grande are invasive. Armadillos in the United States can be divided into two distinct populations, on either side of the Mississippi River. On the west side they spread organically from their natural range. As European settlers transformed the landscape through farming, it became more hospitable to the armadillos and they followed this transformation northward. Armadillos have been found as far north as Nebraska, and they continue to expand their range.

Nine-banded armadillos (so named for the nine bands of armor covering their midsection) on the eastern side of the Mississippi descend from a few individuals that escaped from a private zoo in Florida in 1924, when their enclosure was damaged during a storm. The species has been expanding out from Florida ever since.

The armadillo is a cute, dear little creature that invites sympathy, what with its pea-sized brain and all. Even its behavior and its diet seem harmless at first glance. For the most part, it just wants to dig its little burrow and eat grubs, worms, and wasps. An armadillo is very well equipped for digging, with big, broad feet and sturdy claws.

If it kept to its grubs, then perhaps I’d be inclined to let the armadillo go its own way. But armadillos will eat just about any living thing on or in the ground that it can manage. Ninety-five percent of predation on sea turtle eggs in Florida is the work of the nonnative nine-banded armadillo. The eggs and young of ground-nesting birds are at risk of predation by armadillos (and pigs). Ditto for many species of salamander and for the eggs of many other reptiles. As the nine-banded armadillo continues its northerly expansion, there’s a long succession of endangered species that could be pushed over the brink of extinction by its arrival.

As I drifted off to sleep, I resolved to get myself an armadillo the next night.

Bob and I woke up and went out for lunch, then came back to our motel room to sleep until a few hours before dusk. We met up with Daniel at his place and I helped him butcher an extremely large deer he’d shot and quartered a few days before.

The Georgian deer was enormous compared to what I had been accustomed to butchering back home in Virginia. This came as a real surprise. There is a concept in biology, known as Bergmann’s rule, which describes the tendency for a species distributed widely from the equator toward either polar region to be smaller toward the equator.

This makes sense. When an animal gets bigger, the ratio of surface area (from which heat is lost) becomes lower relative to the total heat-producing body mass. A bigger-bodied animal has an easier time staying warm; a smaller animal loses heat more quickly and avoids heatstroke in a hot climate. In the long run, animals from cold regions, such as those big whitetail deer, will probably either disappear or become smaller when introduced to warmer climates. That said, there are plenty of exceptions to Bergmann’s rule — enough that it might better be thought of as “Bergmann’s gentle suggestion.”

The whitetail buck that Daniel had kept on ice for the last few days represented a pretty big exception to Bergmann’s rule, as did every other deer I saw while I was in that part of Georgia. Whitetail numbers crashed between the 1920s and the 1960s, and there were many reintroduction programs around the United States that apparently didn’t pay close attention to what subspecies of whitetail was being dropped into which area of the country. Whitetails are native to the United States, but it certainly looks as if at some point a nonnative subspecies from a long way north (probably
Odocoileus virginianus borealis
) was dropped into Georgia. I suppose it was better to have the wrong subspecies than no whitetails at all.

We set out in the truck and cruised in the setting sun, with me bouncing around in the back with my own scoped .30-’06 in my hands. I prayed that we’d see a pig before the sun went down so I could take it with a familiar rifle, but we didn’t see anything.

After the sun had set, we went out on foot. We worked the wind and the moon to get over to the same place where we’d seen the lone pig the night before. I quietly explained to Daniel my desire to eat an armadillo, which he thought was absurd but was willing to go along with.

His opinion was that we couldn’t shoot it. Or rather we could but we mustn’t. The sound of the shot would send every pig in the area into thick cover for the next few hours.

An hour into the hunt, Bob spied the white, oblong form of an armadillo about twenty feet from us, near the edge of a field. Daniel was holding the AR-15, which he handed to me before taking off for the armadillo at top speed. I in turn handed the rifle to Bob and took off running myself, switching on my headlamp as I went.

Imagine a game of soccer in which the ball moves on its own, and you’ll have the basic idea of what was afoot: soccer with a moving ball, at night, with headlamps, through a cow pasture. Daniel and I worked the armadillo like a pair of wolves after an elk — steering it where we needed it to go and heading it off away from the woods and thick cover so we would have a chance out in the open.

Armadillos can run surprisingly fast, and for a surprisingly long time. Daniel’s idea was that we could run up and kick it in order to stun the creature before finishing it off. This wouldn’t work too well, though, because the animal is very well armored.

Although the armor is tough, it’s actually not anything like the rigid, bony shell of a turtle; rather, it’s made up of scaly plates of something like very thick skin, called scutes. The armadillo has a big scute on each end of its body, with nine smaller ones in the middle, which allow it some flexibility.

The armadillo we were chasing began to tire and slow down, but then so did Daniel and I. Neither of us was really much of a soccer player. Getting low on energy, I decided it was time to plan an endgame. With a final burst of speed, I took a running jump and put a foot down on the armadillo’s tail, stopping both of us short. I drew a long, sharp hunting knife from its sheath on my belt and wondered for a fraction of a second how to get through the armor before settling on the base of the neck. In one swift motion, the poor little bugger was dead.

You probably won’t get many opportunities to examine the belly of an armadillo, so I suggest you take advantage when a chance comes your way. Curiously, the underside is covered with sparse but thick hairs that give way to scales on the legs. There aren’t a whole lot of animals that sport both scales and hair.

I butchered the armadillo within a few minutes of the kill. The process was a bit awkward, what with the armor. The bulk of the meat appeared to be in the hefty hindquarters, so I carved those out and peeled the rear scute from them. I examined the stomach contents and found mostly grubs, a few yellow jackets, and some plant matter that I couldn’t identify.

The meat was a rich, deep red that reminded me of whitetail venison. I wrapped up the hindquarters in a plastic bag and placed them in a cooler full of ice. It would take some homework to figure out what to do with them. There is a tradition of hunting and eating them in Central America and a cuisine that goes along with that, but you can’t exactly open your ordinary American cookbook to the armadillo chapter and dive right into it.

I’ve since cooked armadillo a few times, and it’s like a cross between chicken and pork. The meat starts out a deep red but turns white as it is cooked. There’s nothing wrong with the taste, and in a blind test I think that most people would be fine with it. Yet — strangely, after all the wild animals I’ve eaten — something sort of gives me the creeps when I’m chewing it. It may just take some getting used to.

Would-be armadillo hunters should be aware that, like human beings, some armadillos can carry leprosy (now often called “Hansen’s disease.”) The disease is most often found among armadillos close to the Gulf Coast, because of particular soil conditions that foster the bacteria that causes it. Cooking kills the bacteria just as surely as it kills other foodborne pathogens like
E. coli.
And even though ninety-five percent of humans are naturally immune to the disease (and simple antibiotics provide an effective cure), it’s still not a smart idea to handle dead armadillos unless you have really done your homework.

We didn’t see any more pigs that night, and Daniel had to pack things in by midnight, as he had to be at work bright and early. Bob and I drove back to Virginia that morning with an armadillo but without a pig. Already, though, we were making plans to return to Georgia for another try.

I finally got my chance to cook a wild pig five months later. As one of the few specialists in hunting and eating invasive species, I get a lot of strange e-mail. Some of that correspondence is from random people inviting me to go hunting with them. I’ve had astoundingly good luck with taking strangers up on their invitations to drive hundreds or thousands of miles to hunt odd things with them in even odder places. It turns out that most people aren’t serial killers, and there’s little danger in wandering around strange wilderness areas with them while they’re heavily armed. Anecdotally, anyway.

This is what happened right about when I needed to bag a pig for keeps. I actually got two e-mails. One was from Kiera Butler, articles editor of
Mother Jones
magazine. She was interested in following along with me on a hunt to find out what this business of hunting and eating invasive species was all about.

The other was a Facebook message from Baker Leavitt, a friend of a former student of mine who had heard about what I was up to. Baker was at that time a resident of New York City but was part-owner of some family property near his childhood home in Georgia. Would I like to “come bust some hawgs!” around Savannah at the earliest possible convenience? Yes, please!

I checked to make sure that it would be okay for Kiera to tag along. She’d never hunted anything, and, in fact, was a longtime vegetarian. (In this, her background reminded me of my own.) As a hunting instructor and guide, though, I was used to working with adults who have no hunting or shooting experience, so this sounded like a situation I could handle.