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

by Jackson Landers

  My feet pounded the ground, and the sensation of a thorn poking into the sole of one foot brought home the fact that I had forgotten to put on shoes. Barefoot running is fine for some people, but a ranch dotted with piles of bison poop and thorny shrubs, in the dark, isn’t the place for this kind of activity.

  Nevertheless, I pressed on, encouraged that I was closer to getting a pig than ever before. I was only a few yards from a small one and could sense imminent victory. A few paces, and I could pounce on it and slip the long blade of my knife into the middle of the right shoulder, where lies the heart. My right hand went to my hip for the familiar feel of the hilt in its sheath and felt . . . nothing.

  In the excitement of the moment, I had dashed from the cottage lacking not only my shoes but also my knife. It was still sitting on the kitchen counter, where I’d used it to chop vegetables.

  I quickly had to acknowledge that there were a few boar in the herd big enough to do damage. As things stood, though, with me flying through the air in the moonlight, these animals were terrified of me. They had no idea that I couldn’t defend myself against the tusks of even a medium-sized pig. To stop and turn around could be interpreted as a sign of weakness. I thought the best thing to do was to bluff and keep on chasing. I ran after them most of the way across the pasture through the short, stiff grass and the jimsonweed until they were well ahead of me. I was safe.

  The next day, we went for a drive on the main road, toward Medina, to run some errands. At around noon, I was surprised to see several dozen deer grazing in the middle of a field. Whitetails don’t normally venture into the open in the middle of the day. The color didn’t look quite right for a whitetail, though, and there was a sort of horizontal band along the midsections. I slowed the car to get a better look and suddenly realized that I was looking at impala.

  A herd of African antelope was living in the wild, right here in North America.

  They were mostly females; a few had the distinctive horns grown only by males. They were of various sizes, and some were obviously this year’s fawns. These impala were not captive livestock behind a high barrier: They were in a cow pasture with only a waist-high wire fence separating them from the road.

  We drove back from Medina with eyes peeled and cameras out, on the alert for any other invasive animals. A dead, bloated axis deer lay by the side of the road. We passed a couple of aoudads on a neighboring ranch. While we were bouncing down a dirt road, a European fallow deer ran out in front of the car. Panicked, it tried to escape by running more than a hundred yards beside the road, along a low fence that any native whitetail would have bounded over. It came to an open gate, skidded to a halt, and stared at it for several seconds before realizing that it could run through it and get away. Perhaps this is one reason why the whitetails still dominate the landscape and the axis and fallow deer are fewer in number; the whitetails are just a bit smarter. It was the pair of grazing zebras that made me realize how bizarre the invasive species situation is in Texas. Helenah was not impressed by them, having spent several months studying and traveling in Africa. But to me, nothing says “exotic” like a zebra.

  The severe lack of rain was ravaging Central Texas. The epic drought was devastating to ranchers and livestock alike. The price of a bale of hay had more than tripled over the year, if you could even find one for sale. Many ranch owners resorted to trucking it in from as far away as Louisiana and Mississippi to keep their herds alive. I saw an alarming number of hay trucks heading west on I-10 on both ends of my trip, but not everyone could afford to transport what became a rare commodity.

  Aside from trucking in food, there were few options open to livestock owners. As the grass dried up and the animals lost weight, many could do nothing but watch them die. Others sold them for slaughter. These were the choices for people raising cattle; for those with exotic animals on their land, the situation was even more dire.

  It’s not easy getting a band of impalas or a couple of wild zebras to step into the back of a livestock truck to be taken to a slaughterhouse. Even if you could, what was the market for zebra meat? These animals were not tame. They lived on ranches of thousands of acres in a more or less wild state, though there were artificial feeders strategically placed.

  A few locals told me in confidence that some ranchers were quietly opening the gates and letting the exotic species leave. If there wasn’t enough forage on their property, the reasoning went, perhaps the animals could manage to survive somewhere else. Even valuable trophy animals stocked for “canned hunts” were released. Also, the ongoing economic downturn meant not many people were willing to shell out thousands of dollars to shoot a cape buffalo or a wildebeest.

  It’s difficult to gauge how much of a problem exists now, a year later, in terms of species diversity and quantity (aside from the wild hogs, which have been studied in some depth). Not all of these species will become invasive; they’re competing with native wildlife adapted to the habitat. In twenty years, the zebras and axis deer may or may not still be around. But some of the African imports have a good chance, not just of surviving but of expanding their range as well. Many come from arid conditions and could do quite well in a drought.

  At last the paying hunters left the ranch, and finally I could have my opportunity. I met with Robert again to discuss house rules. I told him I was interested in hunting and eating aoudad, axis deer, sika, emu, and perhaps some pigs. In deference to my hosts, though, I explained that whatever species was causing the most problems could be my target.

  Robert made a face and looked down.

  “We leave those sika deer alone. They like to feed them up by the main house.”

  “How about the aoudad and axis deer?”

  “The aoudad are off-limits. The axis deer are, too, but you won’t see all that many of them; most of them left for good when we let them out.”

  “Let them out?” I was puzzled.

  “A few years ago, we brought some and kept them in a big enclosure for a while so they’d get used to the place, but when we let them out, they mostly wandered off the ranch.”

  I was dumbfounded. These kind, intelligent people had deliberately brought in an exotic species and released it into the wild. As a guest, I was grateful to them for inviting me to the ranch. I liked Robert, and everyone else who kept the ranch running. Reconciling my respect for him with the deliberate release of axis deer was difficult.

  “The pigs are okay, though,” he said. “We talked about it and it’s okay for you to take a pig.”

  “Wait a minute. Didn’t you guys want the pigs gone? I have them pretty well patterned, and I could probably take three or four at a time with a rifle before the herd gets away.”

  “Well,” said Robert, “we’ve got this other group coming in a few weeks, and we don’t want them spooked.”

  That’s when the real human aspect of the problem in Texas sank in. The people coming to hunt were paying seventeen hundred dollars apiece to stay at the ranch for a multiday pig-hunting program, with catered meals to boot. No pigs would mean no customers. Despite the ecological damage wild hogs cause, at the end of the day, the ranchers needed them.

  For the next few days I stared in frustration at strange quadrupeds from around the world that I wasn’t permitted to pursue. Helenah and I saw a few more antelope, probably impalas or blackbucks. I watched a European red stag behind a fence down the road. I had stumbled into the invasivore’s Shangri-La, only to find that most of the menu was off-limits.

  I got my pig, but it took a while.

  Most hunting in Texas is done from large, elevated box blinds. Imagine a wooden or metal box with a narrow window on each side and a door in the back. The biggest window faces an aluminum feeder that automatically sprays out corn twice a day.

  To the ranchers who erect these blinds and feeders, much of the satisfaction of the hunt takes place before it begins. They may stock the property with the offspring of trophy animals to improve the genetics. They spend years watching to see which
bucks are developing better than others. They plant food plots and experiment with feed mixtures. It’s like playing Farmville with wild animals, except with real science and real skill.

  To a visitor, that work is invisible. Although I don’t believe it’s possible to cheat at hunting when you’re doing it to put meat on the table or to help an ecosystem in trouble, I couldn’t stomach the idea of hunting from a box blind. I don’t foist my views about fair play on others, but for me, the box blind isn’t sporting.

  Instead, I found an open area with plenty of fresh tracks and pig poop, with clear trails to it from a wooded hill above. Checking the wind, I moved a hundred and thirty yards downwind and sat behind some fallen branches as natural cover. Helenah sat just behind me with her camera.

  We waited for a long time as the sun dropped below hills covered with live oaks. Strange noises came from the woods and coyotes howled. A chill moved in and the light turned gray in the last minutes before dark. A crashing sound from the hillside told us the pigs had come. The herd filed into the open. When I lifted my bolt action .30-’06, I could barely make out the big sow in the scope’s crosshairs as I squeezed the trigger.

  The dead pig, with its black body clad with stiff dark bristles, looked like one of the Eurasian wild strains that are referred to in the U.S. as a Russian razorback, a breed not often raised on farms. This pig’s ancestors must have been put out here on purpose.

  The pig was too heavy to move; besides, I wasn’t going to put a pig carcass in my compact car. I butchered it there in the field under the headlights of my car. I crammed the meat into a large cooler, which we hoisted into the backseat, then headed back to the cottage for ice.

  We rolled to a stop before fording a small stream that crossed the road. Suddenly, we heard splashing through the open windows. Some sort of animal, between the size of a deer and an elk, was walking rapidly along the stream, crossing the road from our right to the left. It had long, wide palmate antlers, like those of a moose, and was very dark. Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t a Texas native. I had no idea what it was, and I still don’t. I can’t even guess which continent it came from.

  With a cooler full of pork, I didn’t know what to do with myself for the remainder of my residency. Without Internet access, it was difficult to finish the research and writing I’d intended to do. I realized the next morning that I couldn’t bear to see the global menagerie of invasive meat running around and not be able to do anything about it. It was time to go home.

  The Hill Country is an easy landscape to fall in love with. There’s romance in knowing you could walk around the corner and find yourself face to face with anything from an antelope to a zebra. I liked everything about Texas: the food, the radio stations, and especially the people. Their relationship with exotic wildlife is probably a disaster unfolding in slow motion, but it’s exciting and fascinating nonetheless.

  The pork was delicious, perhaps because acorns, which pigs love, had been thick on the ground. Even a ham I brined and smoked hurriedly had a texture, a color, and a richness of flavor like no other pork I’d ever eaten. Then again, perhaps the pork was good simply because I had worked hard for it and butchered it by my own hand.

  Chinese Mystery Snails

  Occasionally during the course of my hunts, I stumbled across invasive species I wasn’t looking for. One afternoon, I was walking around a pond looking for Canada geese to photograph for a blog entry. I didn’t find any, but I did see what looked like enormous spiral seashells scattered along the shore. I couldn’t think of any native snails that got this big: The shells were up to three inches long, and very dark in color. I slipped a few into my pocket.

  Back home, I did some research. I quickly concluded that I was looking at Chinese mystery snails, Bellamya chinensis. These mollusks are Asian natives often found in the aquarium trade in this country. They’re omnivorous feeders — almost any aquatic plant available might be on the menu, and they’ll devour rotting debris, too. This is why hobbyists like them so much: They help keep a fish tank or a koi pond free of algae and leftover fish food.

  From my research, I learned that these snails were introduced into the wild, among other ways, when Lake Erie was stocked with them in the 1940s, with the idea that the snails would provide good forage for flathead catfish. What happened is that the catfish weren’t especially interested in them. This might be just as well, as the catfish themselves were part of a long parade of nonnative species that humans stocked in the Great Lakes.

  It’s difficult to say exactly what effect the Chinese mystery snails had on Lake Erie. It had been an ecological mess long before their introduction, from pollution and overfishing. And sorting out the damage from one species of snail amid the damage from introductions of smelt, brown trout, alewife, perch, common carp, rainbow trout, and coho salmon is too complicated.

  What we know for sure is that when Chinese mystery snails make an appearance, native species of snails decline to irrelevance or disappear altogether. In their native China, these snails must have an array of natural predators. (Unfortunately, scant research has been conducted on them, even in their natural environment.) In North America, no predator seems to fancy them, so once they become established, they’re difficult to eradicate.

  Once I knew what to look for, I began seeing mystery snails in other places. When I went fishing for invasive snakehead fish along the Potomac River, I saw along the shore mystery snails by the thousands. A park service naturalist told me they’d shown up a few years earlier and quickly dominated the shallows. First, they expanded their numbers, no doubt displacing native fauna. Then, once it seemed like the river couldn’t possibly pack in any more invasive snails per square foot, in summer 2010 the temperature spiked and stayed high for months. The species apparently has trouble with rapid temperature changes. The result was a shoreline ruined for weeks by the stench of rotting snail carcasses. There were enough survivors in deeper water, however, that within a year the population was on the rebound.

  Temperature changes like the one in 2010 could eventually wipe out the Chinese mystery snail in many parts of its introduced range. Indeed, many invasive species could succumb in this way, wiped out by an unusually cold winter or a blistering summer. Green iguanas, for example, are still a big problem in the Florida Keys and in parts of southern Florida, but they were once a threat as far north as Sarasota. Then, along came the winter of 2009, and its extended deep freeze decimated the more northerly population. Green iguanas don’t retreat into burrows, the way black spiny-tailed iguanas do, and thus have no protection against prolonged bouts of cold weather. For a while, they go into a state of torpor, meaning their metabolism slows dramatically. In this condition, they’re unable to move or escape predation. If the temperature rises soon enough, they’ll recover; if not, they die.

  North America is subject to broad swings in temperatures; maybe the Chinese mystery snails won’t make it here in the long run. Who knows if they’ll be present in a hundred years? The trouble is that it won’t take a hundred years for them to eat many native North American species into extinction. Imagine what would happen if they destroyed all the native snails from a number of river systems and then in twenty years themselves died out during a heat spell. We’d be left with no snails at all, with the cascading effects throughout the ecosystem that would result from a buildup of aquatic detritus.

  After I came upon that first population of invasive snails, I started making phone calls. First, I got in touch with the owner of the pond. That happened to be the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, the estate of our third president.

  The irony hit me immediately: Thomas Jefferson was an architect, engineer, and philosopher — and a plant hunter. In his pursuit of horticulture, he experimented with growing many exotic plants here in Virginia. The most notorious locally is the tree of paradise, which is now a much-hated roadside weed. It thrives in disturbed land and is known for burrowing its roots into house foundations and for
invading hay fields. A nursery owner in New York first imported the plant into the United States in the 1790s, but it was the author of the Declaration of Independence who brought it to Virginia. And now, less than a mile from Monticello, on land owned by the foundation bearing his name, another invasive species had gotten a foothold.

  I met with the gentleman in charge of that section of the grounds. As we strolled around the pond, he explained how the snails appeared and became more and more numerous, eventually crunching underfoot with every step as volunteers walked around to maintain the gardens.

  He was somewhat sympathetic, though unconcerned about the ecological consequences of allowing Chinese mystery snails to escape into the river that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay, claiming it wasn’t his problem. He said the foundation would be willing to allow removal of the snails if Virginia’s Department of Game and Inland Fisheries would give the matter its blessing. Fair enough.

  My next step was to talk with the district biologist for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, Mike Dye. Mike had always been of great help when I needed something from his organization, and now he put me in touch with one of the department’s aquatic biologists. Through e-mail, that person asked me to bring him some samples of the snails in question. I rounded up half a dozen snails of various sizes in sample jars filled with rubbing alcohol and delivered them to his office. And then I waited.

  At first I wasn’t worried; it was fall, and the snails would be going dormant for the winter. (In warm weather, they reproduce prolifically, so that’s when they must be kept in check. I discovered this when I put two of them in a small aquarium and tallied up their offspring daily for two months. Within a month, my initial pair had turned into close to forty.) Anyway, the cold months ahead lulled me into thinking we had plenty of time.

  I also tried my hand at cooking Chinese mystery snails. Culturally, Westerners have some context for eating snails; most of us are familiar with the role of another species of snail (Helix pomatia, better known as the Burgundy snail) in French cuisine. It didn’t seem a huge stretch, then, to eat Chinese mystery snails. In fact, there have been large-scale attempts at farming them as an inexpensive substitute for the French snails.