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

by Jackson Landers

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “So you’re saying the state knows this pond is here, full of snakeheads, and has decided to do nothing about it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  I realized as the day wore on that I was badly armed. The situation called for a stiff, sturdy rod with a good reel, but lighter and with more finesse than my surf rod. I needed something that would let me cast carefully to avoid the tangles of weeds and the fallen tree mid-pond that snarled and stole lures from bad casts. I also needed a high-test line and steel leaders that could resist the sharp teeth of a snakehead. Finally, I needed weed-bucking top-water lures that wouldn’t get tangled up on pond scum with every cast. The best look like what was probably a snakehead’s favorite meal — a frog.

  That day I was skunked, but I came away with good plan to land a snakehead. I made the long drive home and the next morning ordered a rod, a reel, and various accoutrements. A week later, I had a proper snakehead rig and again set out to land a snakehead.

  I also did more research on the snakehead’s feeding behavior. I wanted to know exactly how it hit a lure, its favorite foods, and when it was likely to be hungry. I’d fallen into the classic trap of the modern hunter or fisherman: So obsessed with gear, locations, and tactics, I hadn’t focused on the animal itself.

  There were scads of videos of snakeheads feeding in aquariums. I watched them repeatedly and noticed that a snakehead doesn’t usually hit its prey in the same way a largemouth bass does. Like most fisherman from the southern and eastern parts of the country, I was stuck in the bass-fishing mind-set. A bass swallows its prey whole, in one big gulp. It has no teeth, nor does it need any. A snakehead will sometimes swallow small prey whole, but it’s also willing to go after a meal that’s far too big to gulp down. It’s prone to grabbing the tail end of a prey animal with its sharp teeth and twisting its body rapidly in order to tear off a chunk. Deprived of a tail or hind legs, the victim probably isn’t going anywhere. The snakehead then takes its time savoring the meal.

  The pond I’d been fishing was perfect snakehead habitat. These fish don’t care for an environment like the open water of the Potomac. As lunging ambush predators, they’re built for a sudden burst of speed from thick cover. They prefer an area with thick weeds, tall grass, and vegetation so dense that you’d find it difficult to believe any fish could be in it.

  In late spring and early summer, both snakehead parents will guard anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds of their small, bright-red young. Normally, a youngster needs good camouflage, but perhaps the bright color of a baby snakehead helps its parents keep track of and guard it. This advantage balances its increased visibility to predators. Any invader that approaches a young snakehead will be attacked viciously by the parents. This protective behavior accounts for many of the horror stories of snakehead attacks reported by the media.

  Their habits as devoted parents can be exploited during the right season, though. That instinct to attack whether or not the parent fish is hungry makes it easy to catch during spawning season.

  Unfortunately, I had arrived too late; the young were grown and had dispersed.

  Once again I camped at Pohick Bay. I woke up at dawn to drive to Mason Neck. I brought an array of top-water lures to try out, including something called a Scum Frog.

  After some experimentation, I found that the Scum Frog was the only lure in my tackle box to work. Now that I knew what sections of the pond the snakeheads were likely to haunt, I cast repeatedly into muck and snags I never would’ve imagined trying to fish. The Scum Frog has a pair of large hooks with their tips blocked by the soft rubber of the frog’s body. A pair of rubber legs dangle behind. The design works well enough that I could drag the lure through muck without getting snagged and without having to remove the half a pound of weeds other lures brought in.

  The hits began. I’d get a bite, move to set the hook, start bringing in the line, and in a flash the fish would be gone.

  Park staff came to see what was going on with the crazy guy trying to catch snakeheads. They all had stories.

  I was intrigued by the account of Trevor Via. As a land maintenance ranger at Mason Neck, he has spent a lot of time outside. Officially, if you recall, nobody in Virginia has caught more than two snakeheads within a calendar year. Trevor says he caught three in a single day out of that very pond, which must give him the state record, unofficial though it is.

  On that day, Trevor caught the first of the three on a bare hook. The surface was mostly clear of duckweed and muck, and he could see a number of snakeheads hanging around near the surface. He cast, hoping to snag a fish through the side of the body and then drag it in. But he missed his mark. As he reeled in the line, the hook passed in front of a snakehead and the fish lunged at it. Trevor hooked that fish on a six-pound-test line with a light, whippy rod, and the battle was on.

  His fight to land the snakehead would have been shorter if he’d had a heavier line. A thicker, stronger line makes it easier and faster to reel in a fish. In spite of its designation, however, it’s possible to land a ten-pounder on six-pound line. The fight will take longer, and without some finesse on the part of the angler, the line can be broken.

  Trevor said he spent a solid half hour fighting that snakehead all over the pond before managing to bring it to shore.

  The park staff also busted a myth I’d heard time and again: that mature snakeheads in the United States don’t have any predators. I spoke with people who said they watched as ospreys grabbed the adult fish from just beneath the water’s surface. After what I witnessed of thieving ospreys a few miles away, I had no doubts. Even at the corner of the pond where I was fishing now, there’s a tree with bare branches on which ospreys perch, looking down at the water in search of fish.

  This predation is not heavy enough to stop the rapid expansion of snakeheads, but it’s something. Perhaps in ten or twenty years ospreys and bald eagles will have evolved to specialize in hunting adult snakeheads.

  I fished from various spots around the pond. Now and then, a snakehead would come up for an instant to gulp air or lunge at some type of prey. Usually this activity was near the shore or in waters surrounding a fallen tree. By midday, I started to notice some odd things. For example, the bullfrogs didn’t act like bullfrogs. Usually, when you approach one by the water’s edge in daylight, it jumps into the water when you get close. These frogs didn’t do that. I could get to within five feet before they bolted. It was as if they thought whatever was waiting for them in the water was more dangerous than I was.

  At around two, I was watching a goldfinch perched on a branch of the mostly submerged tree in the center of the pond. I took a few pictures, then it flitted to another twig only a few inches from the surface. The water suddenly erupted. Something big and dark seized the goldfinch and disappeared under the water.

  Videos of snakeheads in aquariums confirm that these fish pay a lot of attention to what’s happening above them. You’ll usually see them looking at the spot where food is dropped down to them seconds later, as if they’ve seen signs of an imminent meal. In the wild, they react to movement above them too quickly to be taken with a cast net. (And I know; I’ve tried.) Apparently this reflex helps them feed on terrestrial prey.

  I looked at the slowing ripples on the water and considered my Scum Frog. What I probably needed was a Scum Goldfinch.

  Soon after the goldfinch incident, I cast my Scum Frog into a sweet spot where I was convinced there’d be a snakehead. A hit resulted immediately upon impact. I fought the moderate-sized fish and got a good look at it when it broke water. And then suddenly it was off and gone. I reeled in the Scum Frog and examined it. The legs were shredded but still attached.

  I realized why I wasn’t landing any snakeheads with the Scum Frog. The fish weren’t swallowing it, as would a bass. They were biting the back legs and trying to tear them off to eat; they weren’t getting hooked. I was only dragging them in for as long as they cared to clamp onto th
e rubber frog legs. The fish could let go whenever it wanted to.

  By six o’clock, my whole body ached. I hadn’t sat down or eaten in eleven hours. I figured I’d cast that fishing rod about a thousand times over the course of the day. Perhaps it was a blessing that by six thirty, I’d finally lost good old Scum Frog to that dangerous snag of a tree in the middle of the pond. Without the only lure that had worked at all, I was done for the day.

  I came back early the next morning with an array of similar frog lures. Again I pounded the pond for hours on end, and again I had many strikes but hooked not a one. Running low on money for campgrounds and motels, I drove home to figure out how to land this challenging fish.

  Unfortunately, as of this writing, I haven’t managed to land a snakehead. I went back again and again all through the late summer and fall, camping up the road and spending my days casting for snakeheads until my wrists felt as if they would fall off. I saw plenty of them, and out of all the invasive species I hunted, I learned more about snakeheads through observation than I did about anything else, but they eluded me to the end.

  From Aoudad to Zebra in the Texas Hill Country

  I knew I’d spent too much time in the Hill Country of central Texas when we drove past a pair of dusty zebras standing by the side of the road and I didn’t slow down to take a picture.

  Willie Nelson’s voice blared from the radio, and the car itself hummed beneath me as I downshifted around a corner, up a hill, past thickets of dying oaks and high fences and white limestone cliffs. It was the same car that had carried me thousands of miles around the country while I worked on this book — a little Ford ZX2 coupe, which I had usually piloted alone, with only the radio to talk to.

  This time I had company. Helenah Swedberg, a documentary filmmaker, rode shotgun, keeping me awake and helping with directions. She’d found me through the Internet a few months earlier and started filming shortly thereafter. Many people have asked me to film documentaries or television pilots with them. Helenah, though, was unique: She’d gotten right on a train when I suggested we get to work rather than go back and forth with budgets and outlines and waiting for someone else’s blessing for the project.

  My trunk was packed with the usual guns, butchering tools, nets, fishing tackle, and camping gear. The backseat was heaped with Helenah’s camera and sound equipment. I’m pretty good with a map, but I liked hearing the directions in a soft Swedish accent coming from a pretty blonde in the passenger seat.

  I’d heard stories about hunting in Texas, particularly in the Hill Country. They were stories about enormous game ranches with almost every kind of animal you could imagine: African antelopes, such as kudu, impala, and sable. Strange Asian deer. Even rhinos, elephants, and lions. These are breeding populations of any animal to which a monetary or status value could be attached. If these animals were out there behind high fences for long enough, I thought, sooner or later a fence would get knocked down or a gate left open and animals would escape. For someone hunting invasive species, Texas could be Hell or the Promised Land, depending on how you look at it.

  When I was offered a November residency for artists and writers on a large ranch between the towns of Kerr and Medina, I jumped on it. And when Helenah started following me everywhere with a camera, I suggested that she apply for the same residency in order to film on the ranch and to facilitate an epic road trip. Having someone to pay for half the gas was a nice angle, too.

  We left Virginia as the leaves were changing, drove through the Deep South and the barbecue belt and along the Gulf Coast. The fall colors faded to green as we seemed to go backward in time. Somewhere in Mississippi the palm trees appeared and the barbecue joints became catfish houses and shacks with signs advertising boiled crawfish. Soon, we were in the Texas Hill Country, a part of the state suffering from what was shaping up to be a prolonged drought of historical proportions. Later in the trip, near San Antonio, I saw horses and cattle lying newly dead in their pastures, grim and emaciated. Fortunately, our host ranch possessed several natural springs and had more access to water than any other place I visited in the region.

  The owners of the ranch had awarded me the residency based in large part on the work I was doing: creating awareness about invasive species. They’d been quoted in a newspaper article decrying the ecological and economic effects of the 2.6 million invasive pigs that plague Texas. Having hunted wild pigs, I was more interested in the other invasive species found in the Hill Country, such as aoudad, axis deer, and emu.

  The Hill Country is, in a sense, one big private zoo. In the 1950s, a sort of fad developed when a rancher bought some excess aoudad from a public zoo and released them on his large, fenced property. Aoudad, also known as Barbary sheep, are native to the deserts of northern Africa and somewhat resemble bighorn sheep. They can survive without liquid water, getting all of their moisture from the plants that they eat: a ready-made survivor in dry country.

  The aoudads reproduced quickly and were sold to neighboring ranchers as exotic pets and as big game for eventual hunting. Other species followed. In an area of families flush with oil money and sitting on enormous tracts of land, keeping the strangest game animals they could find was the new status symbol.

  A few ranchers realized there might be some money in this. If people were willing to fly to Africa to hunt antelope, perhaps offering the same antelope to hunt closer to home would have appeal. The business of raising trophy-quality exotic game emerged. Raised either wholly wild or half-tame on big ranches, these animals became a cottage industry. Anything that a hunter would pay to go after was imported for this “sport.”

  Most landowners built high fences around their property; after all, nobody wanted to pay to stock impala if they were going to wander over to somebody else’s land. Had the animals stayed put, maybe this scheme would have worked out. If there’s one lesson to learn about invasive species, however, it’s that wildlife doesn’t want to stay put.

  Our first morning in Texas, Helenah and I were looking for the ranch manager’s house when we saw an axis deer — a species of spotted deer native to India — with a collar around its neck, standing in front of a tidy, one-story house. No fence confined it; in fact, it walked over and sniffed my hand like it was a dog. (I was told later that the deer had been found as a fawn and bottle-raised by the ranch manager’s children. Eventually, it mated with a passing wild axis buck and had fawns of its own.)

  At first I was delighted by the opportunity to see and even touch an axis deer. But soon I realized that the fact these exotic deer were being kept as pets didn’t bode well for my chances of hunting them.

  Helenah and I caught up with Robert, the ranch manager, a cheerful, portly, mustachioed man in his fifties sporting an air of competence. When I asked him about aoudads and pigs, he told me the ranch owners had decided against my hunting for a while. A group of people who had paid to hunt on the property would arrive in a few days, and my hosts didn’t want my shooting to spook the deer and pigs these people would be looking for.

  This was a disappointment, but I understood the situation. I believed the owners’ commitment to sound ecological practices: No high fences enclosed the property (allowing wildlife to freely cross boundaries, which has become the exception in much of Texas), and the fact that they raised bison rather than conventional cattle spoke to their willingness to encourage native species.

  Because I didn’t want to waste any time, I begged my hosts for one exception: that I be permitted to hunt invasive species on the ranch right away, but without the use of firearms. I would be on foot, armed only with a knife. They readily agreed.

  Over the next few days, Helenah and I hiked and drove around the enormous ranch, gathering fossils, dodging bison, and filming material for her documentary. Herds of six to twenty wild pigs would emerge from thick cover and feed during the half hour before dusk. Whitetail deer were more plentiful on the ranch than anywhere else I’ve ever been. Now and then, I’d spot an Indian axis deer or a European fallo
w deer, easily distinguished from the native deer by the spotted coats of the adults.

  My method of hunting began with me running after every group of pigs we saw. Usually at night, we’d be driving down one of the many dirt roads and spot the shapes of pigs in front of us or in a field. Helenah never got accustomed to my habit of suddenly stopping the car, jumping out, and running after a herd of pigs in the moonlight. Perhaps I could have been more diligent about setting the emergency brake before leaving her in the idling vehicle.

  Sometimes I stalked them on foot before running for the final approach. Over the course of a week, I discovered several tricks to getting in close. A herd of fewer pigs was easier to stalk toward; there were fewer eyes to see me. The more ground I could cover by stalking rather than running, the better. Once I started sprinting at the pigs, they’d hear me, and when they began to run, it would all be over in less than thirty seconds. I needed to get to within twenty five yards (and preferably closer) or it was impossible to catch up with them before they’d make it into the woods. I could pursue them only in the open, as I’d lose sight of them in any sort of cover.

  The use of slopes also proved key. If the pigs were even slightly uphill from me, I couldn’t gain an inch of ground. On flat land, we were evenly matched. The ideal was to be running slightly (but not steeply) downhill at my prey.

  I knew better than to try for a big one. Some of the pigs were well over three hundred pounds, and I stayed away from them. Without a pistol for backup, a boar or sow of that size could gore and bite me and possibly even kill me. I also wasn’t going to touch any piglets, lest a large sow run over to defend her baby. My target, then, was a smallish pig between fifty and a hundred pounds, preferably toward the rear of the pack and without a really big pig next to it.

  One night, shortly after dinner, Helenah looked out through the kitchen window and informed me that a herd of pigs was on the lawn. I sprang into action and ran out the door into the grunting, oinking herd.