Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species

by Jackson Landers

  Slow Food is an international organization devoted to the antithesis of fast food. Founded in Italy, it comprises hundreds of “convivia” (a fancy word for “chapters”) in cities around the world. Members are dedicated to preserving traditional foodways and ingredients. Such as wild geese. Doing a Slow Geese presentation in the wake of the miracle on the Hudson made sense.

  My friends at Slow Food agreed, and set a date in late October. They even booked a venue in Brooklyn within walking distance of Prospect Park. All I had to do was show up with some wild giant Canada goose to cook with a skilled chef and be prepared to talk to a bunch of Brooklynites about how they could become locavore hunters and get some geese of their own.

  Now I just needed to bag a few geese; after all, I couldn’t do a cooking demo without the main ingredient. Like many other states, Virginia has a special September goose season with generous limits. In September, any migratory geese haven’t arrived yet, so it’s a safe assumption that any goose killed is a resident.

  There are three primary strategies for hunting the Canada goose: hunting from a blind, pass shooting, and jump shooting.

  Hunting from a blind is the approach most people are familiar with. First the hunter builds a blind near a large body of water. He (or she) then spreads an array of floating decoys on the surface of the water. The hunter is awake at a ridiculously early hour and ready in his blind, freezing his butt off, waiting for sunrise.

  I’ve never engaged in that type of goose hunting: I like to sleep late, thanks. Nor can I afford the dozens of decoy geese this approach requires.

  However, I have a lot of experience with the other types of goose hunting. Pass shooting is easy and fun. Rather than spending twenty dollars on a goose call, I practice making its sound with my own voice. I’ve had excellent success calling in flocks of geese with nothing but my hand and my mouth. I look for a big field with relatively short grass, which is where geese usually land to graze during September and October. (Geese won’t commit to landing in tall grass, for fear of lurking predators, such as you.) I wait there until I hear geese honking in the distance. Most of the time I don’t bother to hide — nonmigratory geese in my area are rarely hunted and so are wonderfully unsophisticated. If I imitate the call well, they’ll fly straight in for me, and I ready myself to shoot as they descend.

  The third type of goose hunting, called jump shooting, is the practice of finding a place where geese are already on the ground, scaring them at close range, and then shooting them as they fly off. This can be done on land or along water, though on water is more common.

  I’d done plenty of pass shooting and jump shooting for geese on ponds, so I decided to try jump shooting on a river to bag my New York City–bound geese. The Rivanna River, which is close to my home in Albemarle County, Virginia, flows past several high-end housing developments whose residents complain vociferously about the geese yet wring their hands about the ethics of hunting. I thought I’d enjoy shooting a few geese as I floated in a canoe past the reflections of their enormous and expensive homes. As long as I was on the river, I’d be within the law.

  So there I was, in a canoe on the river, once again accompanied by my father-in-law, Bob. We thought these resident geese would be so accustomed to being fed bread by hand that we’d be able to get close to them before they spooked. In practice, though, this isn’t what happened.

  The geese seemed to know the difference between guys in a canoe on a river with shotguns and, say, parents and their children on a pond with a loaf of bread. We would round a bend, spot some geese, and start paddling, and they’d take off before a shot was fired. After a few miles of this, I decided that rounding the bend was the problem. The canoe was too visible during that final approach.

  To improve things, Bob and I stopped on a sandbar near the next serious bend in the river. Then, I could move as stealthily as possible on foot to see if there were geese waiting on the other side. We went many miles, stopping at various spits of land so I could test my theory.

  At last, it worked. I left the boat and stepped cautiously and quietly, as though hunting deer, in my felt-soled water shoes. Heel to toe, each step. I parted the grass and peered over at a flock of several dozen geese on the water very nearby.

  This presented a dilemma. Conventional “Marquess of Queensbury” rules of hunting waterfowl state that one must never ever shoot at a duck or goose on the water or on land (this is convention — not law). A hunter is supposed to wait until the goose has started to fly away before opening fire. As a public advocate for hunting for food and for removing invasive species, I never thought of myself as particularly concerned with that sort of thing. After all, the idea isn’t to make it “sporting”; it’s to solve an ecological problem. Yet I had absorbed too much of the traditional ethic. I stood there with my twelve-gauge Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun in my hands and couldn’t will myself to shoot at these geese on the water.

  Okay, something had to be done.

  “Hey, geese!” I yelled.

  That did it. The flock beat their wings and launched their heavy, plant-eating bodies into the air. I picked out the closest one and squeezed the trigger. The bird dropped and I picked out another and shot it as well. I looked for a third within range, but they were higher now and passing the treetops. And then they were simply gone.

  I looked back at the water for my geese and saw both of them swimming hard. I had hit them but not well enough, as they could still at least swim, if not fly. There was nothing for it but to go after them, gun and all. That’s the beauty of hunting with an inexpensive pump-action shotgun: You can get it wet and dirty, and it will usually take a beating and live to shoot another day, even if it is a little uglier for the experience. And if it breaks, you can just buy another one.

  I dived into the water and swam after the escaping birds. The ground level dropped quickly and soon I was in deep water. I felt mud under my feet again after a while and used the butt of the shotgun as a sort of bargepole to push myself off the bottom and advance more quickly. I floated down rapids and spun through white water that would have been minor in a canoe or kayak but posed a lot more trouble on foot with a shotgun in tow. Never did my Outward Bound white-water training serve me better.

  The geese began to lose ground — not so much because of my prowess with a shotgun in white water but rather because they’d been shot with said shotgun, which is why they were swimming and not in flight. Had I been hit with the same dose of steel shot, I’d have dropped out long ago.

  I caught up with the first goose and prepared to finish it off with the gun before realizing that:

  A) This shotgun and its ammunition had just swum down a quarter mile of white water and might not shoot at all.

  B) Even if it did manage to go bang, at a range of less than three yards there wouldn’t be anything left to eat.

  I drew closer to the angry, hissing goose and remembered that, as always, I had a knife in my pocket. The blade came out and the goose and I were mano-a-wing briefly before mano won the day and the goose was subjugated. Then I came up on the other goose on the opposite bank. It fought harder and I couldn’t get the knife close to its neck. Dropping the knife, I grabbed the goose with both hands and dragged it under the water until neither of us could bear it any longer. I rose and took a breath, but the goose was dead.

  More-experienced goose hunters have told me that what I just described is never, ever supposed to happen. Rather, expensive and well-trained retrievers are supposed to see to everything after the first few shots hit. I don’t understand why these hunters are letting the dogs have all the adventure.

  With the geese in hand, I was able to do the goose-cuisine demonstration in Brooklyn just before Halloween. I took Amtrak from Charlottesville to Manhattan with my frozen geese thawing in my suitcase. I stayed in Brooklyn, on my friend Caroline’s couch. We painted the town red on the eve of the goose event; we must have had at least two drinks at every brownstone between the East Village and Park Slope. I
fell asleep on the floor with one of her cats on my head, maybe two hours before I had to wake up.

  Caroline managed to get me up and out of the apartment on time by pouring coffee down my throat. I was almost human when I checked in to the kitchen at a culinary learning center and dropped the geese on the counter for my friend Leighton to start prepping. I stumbled into the bathroom there and stared at myself in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes. Dark circles. At least I’d miraculously managed to shave.

  Somehow, when I was about to start my presentation, forty-five minutes later, I’d been cured of the hangover from hell. The moment it was time to start talking, I came to life and found myself running at one hundred percent. Good thing, too; we had a full house.

  I carved up the geese, then talked about hunting and butchering while Leighton cooked. Leighton bears more than a passing resemblance to Jeff Bridges’s character, the Dude, from the film The Big Lebowski. The goose meat came out perfectly. Our audience enjoyed it enough that whatever scraps remained were claimed afterward. One older gentleman wanted a neck for stock, a young woman took home a spare goose breast, and one guy asked for all of the feet. I haven’t the slightest idea what anyone would want with goose feet, but I gave them to him.

  People seem to have two ideas in their heads about eating geese. First, there’s a vaguely Dickensian image of an all-afternoon ordeal required to produce one meal (generally at Christmas). Even if goose tastes all right, the feeling is that you have to spend all day to get there. Other people believe wild goose will taste gamy and be tough, and isn’t worth bothering with.

  With all meat, age matters. A young example of a species will be tenderer than an old one. If you’re stuck with an old bird, there are steps you can take to tenderize it, or you can process it differently. As with any kind of cooking, really, recognize what you have and deal with it appropriately. Because I’m hunting for food, I’m after a younger turkey, deer, or goose instead of an older, larger one that would make a good trophy.

  Gaminess is usually the product of sloppy butchering rather than the fault of the meat, although with some animals, it can’t be helped. For example, a fully mature, uncastrated boar almost always tastes foul. But for the most part, gamy is a catch-all term for meat that has been butchered badly. Usually it means the hunter took too long to get the meat carved off and then cooled to prevent bacterial contamination. This is a simple matter to deal with when hunting geese; I bring along a cooler full of ice and gut each goose as soon as possible.

  The wonderful thing about hunting giant Canada geese for food is that you get so much for the effort. Many states have a special September hunting season during which resident geese are targeted. Bag limits are usually high, often up to half a dozen per day. There’s more than the meat, too; the down is excellent stuff and comes out easily by the fistful. I’ve gotten into the habit of bringing an extra bag when I’m after geese so I can save the down in it. To kill any parasites, put the down in a cloth bag, stitch it closed, and run it through the dryer on high heat. A goose-down pillow requires just a few geese, or you can improve an inexpensive winter parka by removing the polyester filling and replacing it with wild-goose down, which is much warmer and resists damp.

  The Slow Food cooking demo in Brooklyn received a good amount of press, and I repeated it back home in Virginia, this time at a winery and with a different group of chefs. Everyone thought the geese were worth eating. The only problem was that New York was still dumping its geese in landfills.

  Months went by and I’d just about given up hope of changing anything. Suddenly, at the moment I least expected it — on the very evening when I got home from my long, strange hunt for nutria in Louisiana — I learned that New York City had finally relented. It would be sending its thousands of culled geese to Pennsylvania, to be donated to food banks.

  Tilapia, Plecos, and Armored Catfish

  After the nutria odyssey, I wanted something uncomplicated for my next hunting trip. Learning about Philippe’s successes in creating a market for nutria piqued my interest in other invasive species that could be moved onto grocery shelves and restaurant menus.

  It would help to focus on something people were already comfortable eating, such as tilapia.

  Tilapia is a fish known for its somewhat bland and unfishy flavor. It’s a fish for people who don’t especially like fish. It’s widely available in grocery stores because it’s easy to farm. In fact, genetic testing has shown that quite a lot of what is sold as another species of fish is tilapia: It’s been fraudulently passed off as everything from Chilean sea bass to cod.

  The simplicity of farming tilapia has led to its use in aquaculture around the world, in places far from its natural habitat in Africa and the Middle East — places like Florida.

  Tilapia is actually a catch-all name for many dozens of species that belong to the Cichlidae family. Cichlids are popular for home aquariums, for a couple of reasons. First, they’re good parents (as fish go). They care for their young longer than most other fish do, giving them an advantage over less doting parents that don’t watch out for their offspring. Second, cichlids hybridize readily — that is, they’ll mate with other species, occasionally creating a new breed.

  The invasive tilapia started out as Oreochromis aureus, the “blue tilapia,” which was introduced into the wild by the state of Florida in 1961. It was hoped the blue would become a popular game fish and also would devour some of the unsightly algae on Florida’s lakes. It was assumed that Florida’s largemouth bass would keep tilapia numbers in check.

  In practice, blue tilapia were aggressive enough and grew fast enough to hold their own against the native bass. They multiplied rapidly and expanded their range beyond the lakes via the state’s vast system of canals. According to Duane Chapman, a fish biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who specializes in invasive fish, enough tilapia farms have been flooded (by hurricanes) and enough aquarium hobbyists have dumped unwanted fish that, because of their rather loose mating habits, there probably aren’t many pure Oreochromis aureus left in Florida.

  When I think of Florida and invasive species, my mind makes a beeline to George Cera, with whom I’d hunted black spiny-tailed iguanas the previous summer. George and I had kept in touch, and I was a guest on his radio talk show a few times. We talked on the phone now and then and kept up with each other’s adventures. Because he knows wildlife inside and out and shares my passion for going after invasive species, he’d be the best guy in Florida to join me in pursuit of invasive fish.

  I called him on a Thursday, right after returning from an outdoor writers conference in Utah. My suitcase was still packed. Our conversation went like this:

  “Hey, George, you want to throw cast nets in canals next week and see what’s really going on with the tilapia down your way? Maybe we can bag some other stuff while we’re at it.”

  “Okay, but I need a guest in the studio on my radio show at eleven on Saturday morning. Can you make it?”

  “That’s a two-day drive . . .”

  “Yeah, but I really need you on the air here.”

  “Okay, then.”

  A few hours later I was in the car, driving south as the sun went down. I think I got as far as North Carolina before I realized that my suitcase was packed for the snow-covered peaks at a ski resort in Utah rather than the muggy heat of Florida in July. Oh, well; too late.

  I arrived at the studio with half an hour to spare. We did the show and then drove out to Gasparilla Island, where I checked into a lovely cottage that the good people of the Gasparilla Innlet had furnished for my use during the off-season.

  The cottages at the Innlet are actually old houses of the classic local style: low, single-story cottages with hip roofs and a generous front porch. Each has been divided into four luxurious units, each with a private entry. It feels cozy and private, but in reality there could be someone on the other side of the wall from you.

  After settling in, I went over to George’s place, a few blocks away. We d
ecided to get right to fishing. My car was already filled with gear of every description to meet any invasive-fish contingency, from crab traps to surf rods. George got in and we drove to the mainland at the edge of the Myakka River State Park.

  Tilapia are primarily plant-eaters, so they don’t often see a reason to bite a hook. This makes netting the most practical way of catching them. Fortunately, I had brought a small cast net of three or four feet in diameter.

  A cast net is round, with weights around the edges and a long rope attached to the middle of it. You throw it in such a way that it spreads out in midair and sinks quickly when it hits the water. In addition to making it sink on top of any fish immediately, the weights close the net around any prey as it’s lifted when you hoist the rope.

  The first spot we tried was beside a small bridge over a canal. A bridge is a good place to fish in hot, sunny weather because fish seek its shade. Taking care to loop the end of the rope around my wrist (to use to raise the net), I threw what was surely the worst toss of a cast net George had ever seen.

  George demonstrated the correct way to gather and throw the net. Holding a weight in each hand, you rotate your upper body to put a spin on the net and, through centripetal force, make it spread out fully.

  “Throw it like it owes you money,” he said.

  That was good advice. I tossed that net as hard as I could. After a while, it started coming back in with fish. At first I was getting little native sunfish and baby bass. Then the darndest thing was flopping around in the net as I brought it up onto shore.

  An armored catfish.

  It was covered in what appeared to be an overlapping series of vertical plates along the length of its body. If you enlarged it to the size of a Greyhound bus, this fish would look like something out of the Devonian period. As it stood, the fish was about eight inches.

  Armored catfish have been popular in home aquariums for years. They’re native to the Amazon Basin, which is a tough neighborhood. If a fish can make it there, it can make it anywhere, given warm enough water. Armored catfish go by the name Callichthys callichthys, but scientists suspect that what’s called C. callichthys in the aquarium trade is actually many similar but distinct species yet to be sorted out by taxonomists.