Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (8 page)

Bob was game for another trip, so we made the day’s drive together from Charlottesville to Savannah in the dead of February. We checked into our hotel, just outside the city limits, and met up with Kiera. She was a tall, whip-thin young woman who, for a vegetarian from San Francisco, seemed quite eager to kill a pig.

Baker’s family’s place turned out to be a thousand acres of old rural Georgia standing firm in the face of suburban encroachment all around. We drove into what seemed to be a long-established suburban neighborhood and took a turn into a dirt alley between a few houses, and pretty soon we were back in the country. Stands of live oak were mixed with scrub pines, swampy bottoms, and long meadows that had been carved out of the woods.

Baker is a strong, sturdily built man devoted to the CrossFit movement. (Many of my hunting students have also been part of CrossFit, which is a strength and conditioning program for professional athletes, police, military, and ordinary people.) He spoke rapidly of more businesses he had invested in or started than I could keep track of. Somehow, he was working on an energy-drink company and a sporting-equipment business and a few other projects, all while enrolled in an Arabic-language program at a university in New York City. I imagine he’s bound to strike it big in something sooner or later, on odds alone.

Before we hunted, I gave Kiera a crash course in shooting a hunting rifle. We set up an ad hoc range, and I found out what she could do with the 7mm-08 deer rifle that I brought for her. She did well enough for a first-timer, and I figured she’d be all right to seventy-five yards or so. I’d been drilling her on the vulnerable areas of a pig’s anatomy for the last few weeks and was confident that she knew which part of the animal to shoot.

Kiera and I walked under a white, threatening sky to our two-person blind. Bob was less than a mile away in a blind of his own. It began to drizzle, but Kiera bore the bad weather with good cheer. We saw many fresh tracks in the area, but no pigs trotted out.

Around midday, we heard several shots from less than half a mile away. I was pretty sure they’d come from Bob’s lever-action 30-30 rifle, so we headed back to the dirt road and toward the barn to find out if he’d gotten something.He had! It was a young boar of around sixty pounds — old enough to have put on some size but still young enough to be free of the “boar taint” (an unpleasant smell to the meat) that is reported in older, uncastrated pigs. We carried it to a wooden platform that was built for the purpose of butchering, and I set to work.

I had never butchered a pig before, so I approached this one in the same way I would butcher a deer. First, I gutted it, noting the various similarities to and differences from deer viscera. Kiera watched with interest and never shied away from what was happening. After it was gutted, Bob hung the pig from a hook and skinned it. (Skinning a pig is, by the way, fairly hard work; the hide is tightly bound to the body compared to how it is with most other mammals.) We put the carcass on ice in a large cooler and did most of the final butchering when we returned home.

In the end, neither Kiera nor I shot a pig on that trip, but we were happy that our expedition was successful and that we had meat to bring home. As far as I know, she’s still a vegetarian, but before we parted ways, she carved off a forequarter of her own and cooked it up for dinner.

I did a lot of cooking with that pig and with other pigs, wild and domestic, that I’ve killed since. What I found is that the flavor of a wild pig is just about identical to that of a pig raised in the open on a small farm. The difference is in fat content: Domestic pigs put on a lot more fat, which makes for thicker bacon that’s easier to cook in the usual ways. There’s also more consistency in the size of hams and pork chops from domestic pigs, because they’re slaughtered at a specific point in their growth, when they’ve reached a standard weight. I found no gaminess and no toughness to the meat beyond what happens to any animal as it ages and collagen builds up.

As food, wild pigs are superb. Hunting them takes work and skill, but once a hunter gets to be as good at it as Daniel Gentry is, a lot of mouths can be fed (and wildlife habitat saved).

Lionfish

“I know that if I come back every couple of weeks and kill every lionfish I see, the other fish are gonna come back,” Mojo said. “So that’s what I do, man. And that’s my little corner of the ocean, where we still see the wrasses and the damselfish and the baby grouper and everything else.”

My lungs felt as if they would burst as I swam to the back of an underwater cave at the bottom of a cliff. I readied the steel trident in my hand and launched it through the murky water into the body of a reasonably large lionfish. The angry mass of venomous, needlelike spikes twitched and flopped, impaled on my spear. Desperate for air, I swam backward as quickly as I could while trying not to bang my head against the roof of the cave.

Suddenly, just as I was inches from a breath of air, the lionfish managed to wriggle off the end of the spear and dart toward me. Alone and hundreds of yards from the nearest point along the cliffs where I could get out of the water, I wondered whether I would be able to make it out if the lionfish chose to give me a dose of venom.

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

Having gotten a pretty good taste of how invasive species are being dealt with in the United States, I wondered what was happening differently in other countries. This curiosity coincided with coming across the work of Maurice “Mojo” White.

Mojo hunts lionfish around the island of Eleuthera, which is in the Bahamas. He hunts them with an evangelical passion. I think Mojo, an American who’s been spending most of the year on Eleuthera diving and surfing since the late 1980s, feels possessive about the reefs: They’re
his
reefs, and the lionfish have invaded them.

The lionfish is a species native to the Pacific and Indian Oceans and is so named because of the manelike array of long, venomous spikes extending from its fins. It reaches no more than sixteen inches long, but the lionfish brings trouble out of proportion to its size. Each of those spikes works like a hypodermic needle and is capable of pumping deadly venom into anything that picks a fight with it.

The danger to humans can be compared with that from the bite of a black widow. A lionfish’s sting on land isn’t usually lethal, but if you get poked while you’re handling the fish in a boat or in the kitchen, it’s going to ruin your day. Some people are all right within an hour; others describe a blinding pain that rendered them unable even to stand, followed by the affected limb swelling to twice its normal size and a recovery process that lasted months. The effects seem to vary depending on what part of the body is stung, the dose, and whether or not medical attention comes quickly. Only a very few people succumb.

In the water, however, the sting of a lionfish could mean death. If the pain and swelling prevent you from swimming back to land, drowning is on the agenda unless you have a very alert dive buddy.

This was on my mind as I helplessly watched the wounded lionfish decide whether to seek revenge. I was lucky that day. The fish retreated into the underwater cave. I surfaced rapidly, gulping for air.

Lionfish have shown up in the Caribbean and surrounding waters only recently. It’s widely believed that the lionfish were in an aquarium in a coastal Florida home when 1992’s Hurricane Andrew smashed it into the ocean, and they escaped into the Gulfstream. This doesn’t explain how the lionfish showed up in the waters around Eleuthera some five years ago, but the locals have a theory: They think lionfish eggs were accidentally released to the open water when a high-end resort, boasting what’s billed as the world’s largest tropical marine aquarium (including a population of lionfish), discharged water from its tanks into the ocean. Apparently, it was only after the resort stocked its tanks with lionfish from the Pacific and Indian Oceans that they also began appearing in local reefs.

The effect of these fish on the reef ecosystem has been rapid and profound. Lionfish will eat just about anything they can fit into their mouth, which isn’t unusual for a fish. The trouble is that there isn’t much in the Atlantic Ocean that finds them worth fighting. Their deadly weaponry discourages most advances. A big, mature grouper will from time to time suck down a whole lionfish, but lionfish seem to eat a lot of immature grouper and are gradually reducing their numbers. Reefs that were once teeming with a broad variety of life only a few years ago are now almost deserted. In some cases, there’s not much left except for lionfish and corals.

Mojo started a blog and a show on YouTube devoted to teaching people to hunt lionfish.
Hunting
is definitely the word for it. It isn’t efficient to drop a hook and line and wait for one, as you would with most other kinds of fish. Lionfish hide under rocks, reefs, and other underwater structures, on which a fishing line or a net is apt to snag. They pick a good underwater ledge or alcove and then spend most of their time defending it, and not swimming in open water. You could sit there in a boat all day and not know whether a lionfish was there or if you need go to twenty yards away to the next ledge. The way to really get things done is to get in the water with a mask, fins, a snorkel, and a spear.

After a long phone conversation with Mojo, it became clear that I had to get myself out to Eleuthera to work with him and learn about how the Bahamians are dealing with the lionfish invasion.

I figured it would take two or three days to get what I needed, which meant I had to budget at least a week. That’s the funny thing about tropical islands: No one is in a hurry. Ever. Why should he be? The advantage of living on a tropical island in the first place is that things get done when they get done, and maybe they don’t get done at all.

The day before I left for Eleuthera, I got a phone call from Mojo informing me that he’d be tied up for a few days in Nassau and wasn’t sure when he’d be getting back. This was a bit of a snag in the plan, as I didn’t know a soul in the Bahamas other than Mojo, and with nonrefundable tickets I was going to be on that plane the next morning no matter what.

I wouldn’t be landing completely cold, however. Mojo arranged for a friend of his, Julian, to rent me a car and to meet me at the airport. The thing is, there are no big rental companies on Eleuthera. If you need a car, it’s a question of who you know. Mojo’s parting tip before hanging up was that Julian was the fixer. If I needed guns for a goat hunt, information on where to find lionfish, a boat, Julian would be the guy to talk to. Mojo also said that what Julian loved more than any other material thing was venison, which is in short supply on an island with no deer.

Although I was short on money, I had plenty of venison. A whole fridge full, in fact. In the midst of packing, I found time to butcher a couple of hindquarters that I’d been aging from a deer I had shot. I chose the best cuts and prepared them as carefully as I could. I packaged the meat in Ziploc bags, then froze the steaks, roasts, and medallions overnight so that they would stay fresh for the journey.

My first few flights en route to Eleuthera were uneventful, but once I got to Nassau, Delta couldn’t get me any farther. Pineapple Air, a local carrier, would take me the rest of the way. I climbed up the steps into a very small prop plane and took one of the few seats.

The cockpit and pilots were right there in front of us, no door or divider. This was handy later in the flight, because I got to watch and listen as various alarms and warnings went off. Something would start beeping or ringing incessantly and a light would blink rapidly. In every case, both pilots appeared to be ignoring the alarm. I couldn’t make up my mind whether to find that reassuring or terrifying.

The ride became turbulent to roller-coaster proportions. I decided not to worry about it too much. My seat belt was buckled, I don’t tend to get airsick, and I figured that what with the many islands and cays I could see from the window, it probably wouldn’t be too bad a swim if the plane went down in the water.

The plane approached the runway at the North Eleuthera airport shaking, and with some type of alarm going off, as the back end of the plane shimmied in a brutal crosswind. The actual touchdown, though, was surprisingly smooth.

Mine being the only white face in the airport, it wasn’t difficult for Julian to spot me. It was a good thing I had someone to drive me around for the first few hours because, as it turns out, the Bahamas are one of those odd places where people insist on driving on the left side of the road. I had been unaware of this fact and, if left to my own devices, probably would have plowed straight into the first oncoming vehicle.