“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 o
n 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
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.
Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Page 3