Feral Cities

by Tristan Donovan

  Most of the iguanas we see lurking on the canal banks are green iguanas, which can grow to six feet long, but there are other types of iguanas in the city too, including the black-and-white-colored Mexican spinytail iguana. “They are not dangerous to humans, but the problem with them is they eat flowers,” says Alex. “We have a wonderful botanic garden, which is beautiful and world-renowned, but it’s challenged because the iguanas go in there and take care of all the buds.”

  Like the snails and the chickens, people brought the iguanas to the city. “Some were escaped pets, but most came from our old zoo,” says Alex. “We had this little zoo out on Key Biscayne, Crandon Park Zoo, and they had iguanas roaming around. The zoo moved and when they left, the problem spread out and they took over the city.”

  Today iguanas are so widespread in Miami that people pretty much ignore them. “They are just kind of accepted. A lot of people don’t even know that they are not native. They poop and people don’t like to look at them, but you can’t get rid of them. And when you have pythons to worry about, iguanas are low on the food chain.”

  Ah, yes, the snakes. The Miami metropolitan area is home to increasing numbers of boas and pythons, which vie with giant African land snails for the title of animal enemy number one. Just a few weeks before my visit, a man in Hialeah discovered a thirteen-foot albino Burmese python living under his shed. Shortly after, a ten-foot-long rock python strangled a sixty-pound Siberian husky to death in a backyard, despite the dog owner’s frantic attempts to kill the snake with a pair of garden scissors.

  Mercifully, attacks on dogs, let alone people, are rare. But the risk is real, so local agencies and biologists have banded together to form the Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, or ECISMA for short. Its mission is wide-ranging. Members patrol for giant African land snails in city parks and battle with the mile-a-minute vine, a fast-growing invasive plant with barbed tendrils that smothers rival vegetation.

  Another ECISMA project focuses on the boa constrictors living on the 444-acre Deering Estate in Cutler, fifteen miles south of downtown Miami. Boas have been breeding in Miami since the early 1990s, and ECISMA is trying to learn more about their behavior. To do this they have surgically implanted tracking devices into two boas on the estate—one male, one female.

  I meet up with Dallas Hazelton, preserve manager at the estate, and Miami-Dade Parks and Recreation’s Jane Griffin Dozier, who are both involved in the boa tracking work. The problem with the boas, they tell me, is that they pose a threat to south Florida’s native wildlife, including animals living in the Everglades.

  Like the iguanas, the boas came to Miami as pets, says Dallas: “My records of boas only goes back to 1999, but there are undocumented reports of boas dating back to the ’70s. At some point it must have been a release or escape. This is the only known breeding population of boas in the United States.”

  They offer to show me the female boa, so we head into the estate through a gated entrance off Southwest 152nd Street. As we drive in along a bumpy track, I notice that there are homes all along the estate boundary. Dallas says the boas have troubled the residents from time to time. “We had an unfortunate incident a couple of years ago,” he says. “There was a neighbor over here, and one of the guards found this dead big tomcat and a dead boa lying right next to each other. The boa had strangled the cat, but in the process the cat had bit up the snake so bad that it died from its wounds.

  “The neighbor was putting up signs with a picture saying ‘Here’s my missing cat, call us if you find him.’ Someone had to call her to tell her. She was very upset.”

  We drive deeper into the forest, the road bordered on either side by dense vegetation punctuated by spindly paurotis palm trees. We stop close to the boa’s last recorded location. Jane opens the trunk of the truck and pulls out a large electronic box and a handheld aerial, not unlike an old-fashioned rooftop TV aerial. She plugs the aerial into the box, holds the aerial up, and twists a dial on the box. She turns to face the tangle of bushes and the box goes bip, bip, bip. “This way,” she says.

  We follow her into the forest, fighting with vines that snag our feet as we push through the foliage. Bip, bip, bip goes the tracker. We press deeper and deeper into the undergrowth, dodging poison ivy as we go. The bip, bip, bip of the tracker seems to get louder with every step.

  Adrian Diaz, the Miami-Dade County Animal Services investigator who is with us, asks Dallas if he can pick up the snake when we find her. “No, we don’t want to disturb them. We want them to go about much as they naturally do. We don’t touch them,” says Dallas.

  Adrian looks a little disappointed. On the way here he was telling me about his lifelong love of snakes. “As a kid I was never afraid to catch the little corn snakes and garden snakes. Never been afraid—there’s just something about them,” he explained. “At one point I had them at home and everything. I had a blood python, two Burmese pythons, green tree boas, all sorts of stuff. My wife obviously put an end to that quick.”

  Bip-bip-bip. It’s definitely getting louder.

  Around this point it strikes me that before this moment I’ve never seen a snake outside a zoo. My encounter with the Phoenix rattlesnake is yet to come. I vaguely remember seeing a tail of an adder, Britain’s only venomous snake, disappearing into a bush as a kid—or, at least, I think I saw it. In fact, thinking about it again, I was probably just told there were adders there and imagined the rest.

  Besides, adders are cowardly snakes, more likely to flee before you find them than bite. Now I’m about to come face-to-face with a wild boa constrictor. I hope I don’t panic.

  Bip-bip-bip. It’s definitely louder. Bip-bip-bip. And more frequent. It’s starting to feel like the scene in the movie Alien where they search the spaceship for the monster using motion trackers. I glance at the palm trees. What if it’s in a tree? Boas are capable climbers, I think to myself.

  Jane walks forward then turns and moves back. Bip-bip-bip. She does a U-turn and moves forward again and then back again. Bip-bip-bip. “If there’s a burrow here it should be on the ground,” says Dallas.

  We stare at the ground at our feet. Jane moves back and forth, back and forth. It’s definitely here. Right here. Bip-bip-bip. A few tense seconds pass, and then the snake slips out from the undergrowth right by our feet, slithering as fast as she can. My heart stops briefly.

  “There she goes,” says Jane. We follow, lurching over vegetation and ducking under vines to keep up with the five-foot-long snake as it slides along the forest floor. It’s not as threatening as I imagined and it’s clearly keen on getting away from us. It’s pretty, too—its body a patchwork of hexagonal yellow, brown, and black scales.

  Adrian gets ahead of the snake, takes a few close-up photos as her glassy eyes stare back, and then we let it escape. The boa wastes no time and vanishes back into the safety of the undergrowth.

  It turns out that finding them when you’re right on top of them is normal. “They are adapted to camouflage themselves,” says Dallas. “I think that’s why so often I only find them when I’m right on top of them.”

  As we head back to the road, I ask him what they hope to learn from the tagged boas. “We’re hoping to get information that will help us catch them,” he replies. “Like where we are likely to find them and at what time of day or year and in what weather.”

  The data is still being crunched, but the initial impression is that they are going to be hard to catch. “Based on what I’ve seen, the biggest thing we’ve learned is that they spend up to 90 percent of their time underground, either in animal burrows or natural small cave features,” he says. “This makes locating the non-radio-tagged ones for removal pretty much an impossible task, because the only time you even have a chance at seeing them is that 10 percent of the time that they are above ground.”

  Afterward I visit another player in Miami’s snake control efforts: the fire service. The city’s exotic reptiles have changed Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, taking its an
imal work well beyond getting cats out of trees.

  The service has a venom response unit that boasts the United States’ largest store of antivenoms, and its expertise is so renowned that it offers its venom services nationally and internationally. The unit also captures problem snakes and other reptiles.

  Captain Jeffrey Fobb heads the unit. Moving into reptile control was a logical step, he says: “It started because we’re around twenty-four hours, and when people get sacred of stuff they call 911. A lot of these animals, particularly the exotics, are found after dark, and our familiarity with the animals makes us well suited to dealing with it.”

  When we meet he has just returned from the city’s airport. “There was a ball python in a taxi cab,” he says matter-of-factly, as if cab-riding pythons from Africa are normal in Miami. Did someone leave it behind or did it crawl in? “It crawled in there at some point. Who knows?” he says. “It was a valuable animal. It had a couple of injuries, so I took it to the zoo to have it euthanized.”

  Over the years the fire department has collected hundreds of pythons. They’ve pulled them out of backyard swimming pools, picked them up in people’s garages, and recovered ones that got injured while crossing roads. Not that every call out proves fruitful. “I was rung out for a dog turd once—somebody thought it was a snake.”

  Another reptile Jeffrey deals with is the Argentine black and white tegu lizard. Many of the tegus in Miami are thought to be descended from a bunch imported from Paraguay by a pet dealer in the early 2000s but then released because they had broken tails or other defects. Others may have been escaped pets. Tegus are good at digging, and it is thought that some escaped by burrowing their way out of outdoor enclosures.

  “Wanna see one?” asks Jeffrey. He gets a bag from his vehicle and pulls out a tegu, holding it by the neck so it can’t bite him. Its bead-like scales form a mixed-up pattern of green-white and black, and its feet end in long, sharp claws designed for digging. The lizard flicks its forked tongue out and glares at us, but thanks to Jeffrey’s tight grip it can’t do anything.

  “I got this one at a trailer park,” he says. “There are two trailer parks that are loaded with them, close to a hundred tegus. Animals like this are hard to run down. Snakes depend on their camouflage. These guys are very flighty, very active, and they will bite and it will really, really hurt.”

  There are probably thousands in the county now, he says. Florida City and Homestead are particular hotspots. “They live anywhere. They burrow under leaf litter, burrow underneath dog houses. There was one in Kendall that we chased for nine months. It finally got caught under a doghouse—it went to sleep and let its tail slip out,” he says.

  “They are like raccoons without fur but active during the day, so they can frighten your children. They eat anything—prepared food, unprepared food, good food, bad food. They eat whatever they can get. Where they come from in Argentina they are a nuisance animal. They get into people’s gardens and fight with their cats over the food they put out.” There are even reports that in campgrounds outside Buenos Aires tegus beg people for food.

  Yet little is known about their activities in Miami, so the race is on to learn more about their movements and what they eat. “We don’t know a lot of things about any of these animals,” says Jeffrey. “We don’t know how they use the landscape, how they move around, or how often.”

  I ask him what animal in the Miami area worries him most. “People,” he says without hesitation. “Not even the mad ones, just those who get irritated in traffic. Everybody’s worried about animals, but animals are less likely to hurt you.”

  People are also the reason why Miami is dealing with these problems. From dog-strangling pythons and garden-eating iguanas to giant snails and child-scaring tegus, they are all here because people brought them to the city. It may have been accidental, like an escaped pet tegu. It may have been a genuine mistake, such as the grandma who threw away the giant African land snail eggs. But sometimes, as with the chickens, it is very much deliberate.

  It also seems unlikely the influx will stop anytime soon. “In the past two weeks, we’ve probably found around seven new exotic species,” says Jeffrey. “You’re looking at maybe six years of lag time between the release of the animals and the population becoming evident on any large scale.”

  Miami’s next animal invasion may well already be there, breeding out of sight, just waiting to be discovered as the latest human-aided addition to the city’s wildlife.

  THE GREAT SPARROW MYSTERY

  Fighting Starlings in Indianapolis and Saving Sparrows

  It’s early evening in downtown Indianapolis and Wes Homoya of the US Department of Agriculture is hard at work. He is standing near the Indianapolis Union Railroad Station on Jackson Place, banging together two wooden planks with gusto. Noisy clack-clack-clacks echo around the area outside the Romanesque Revival station building.

  Wes scans the sky. Far above us are starlings. Lots of starlings. A couple thousand at least. The birds have spent the day searching the countryside, raiding landfills, and combing the streets for food. Now, back in the heart of Circle City, they are determined to bed in for the night. But Wes and his boss, Judy Loven, are here to stop them.

  The birds gather in the air, forming a dense cloud that darkens the sky. The cloud swirls and ripples like an ocean wave as the birds circle over potential roosting sites. They fly mere inches from one another. Turning, spinning, and diving in unison to confuse predators like the peregrine falcons that live a couple of blocks away on Market Tower.

  That the starlings do not crash into each other is nothing short of miraculous. These starling murmurations are enchanting sights, one of the true wonders of nature, but for Judy and Wes it signals a race against time to stop the birds bedding in for the night.

  As the early October daylight fades, the battle for downtown Indy begins. Wes bashes the planks together as the birds swoop down. Most shoot back into the air, back to the safety of the murmuration, but a few dive into the trees next to the station. Wes hits the planks together again, but the panicked birds have decided it is safer in the foliage and stay put.

  Wes tries clapping the boards together right under the trees. The starlings don’t budge. “They have been a little more aggressive lately,” he says. “Normally, all of them would fly on, but we’ve got a couple that are being really stubborn and want to still come in.”

  Judy gets out another weapon. A silver laser pen. It’s the kind you might see used at a corporate presentation, but this evening it’s an anti-starling device. She shoots a five megawatt beam of concentrated green light into the tree and wiggles the pen. The birds still don’t move. It’s too light for the laser to be effective.

  The starlings in the tree are a problem, says Judy. “Trees are where they first go. By November the leaves should be off the trees, and then they won’t find the trees that appealing anymore. That’s when they head for the buildings, so we wanna make sure we get them out before leaf drop so we don’t have a population here that moves onto the buildings.” By then there won’t be a couple thousand starlings descending on Indianapolis. The birds above us are merely the early arrivals. They are the scouts who will establish this year’s roosting spots. Come November, as many as half a million starlings will be here and tens of thousands of them will be looking to set up camp downtown.

  Judy and Wes debate whether it is worth getting out the pyros. Firecrackers are another of the USDA’s stock of starling deterrents. Judy shows me the launcher, a matte-black handgun, shaped like a revolver. It looks just like a real gun. “Yep,” says Wes. “This is the main reason why we communicate with the police department and wear our shiny vests. We definitely want to make sure nobody mistakes us for somebody walking around downtown flashing a gun.”

  The gun takes two types of pyro. The first are the “screamers” that shriek, whine, and hiss as they spiral through the air, leaving a trail of smoke behind them. Screamers are the pyro of choice when fending off s
tarlings amid the tall buildings of downtown. The alternative is the “banger.” “The bangers sound like gunfire, so we try to minimize the use of the bangers,” says Judy. “We try to do it more in the open areas like the parks, because somewhere like here we’re surrounded by buildings and they echo really bad. But there are times.” Enough times for downtown to have permanent signs warning people of “loud noises” on winter evenings and for 911 to be used to dealing with frightened people who mistake the firecracker bangs for shootings in the heart of the city.

  Today, however, there will be no bangers or screamers. They decide it is better to stick to wood and laser pens, and hold back the pyros until more starlings arrive for their winter residence. “Over time they habituate,” says Judy. “They are already starting to get to the stage where they are not paying so much attention to the clap boards as we would like them to.”

  She offers me the wooden planks. “Here you go: some USDA government equipment! Don’t pinch your fingers.”

  Inevitably, that’s the first thing I do. My wood-clapping skills fall well below those of Wes. When I’m not painfully trapping my fingers, I am making a noise that is more a muted irregular donk than the loud, crisp clack Wes delivers. The birds in the tree and the sky ignore me. Sorry, Indianapolis.

  While I struggle with the two-by-fours, Wes puts the laser pen to use. It is darker now and the beam can now be seen dancing on the leaves as Wes twirls the pen in a figure-eight pattern. A few of the starlings panic and fly out of the tree, flapping their wings as fast as they can.

  There are more surprises lying in wait around downtown for these distinctive birds, which stand out thanks to the white flecks and iridescent purple-green sheen of their black wings. There are sound systems on rooftops blasting out starling distress calls. Some buildings are shielded with plastic netting that makes landing difficult. Others have electric wires running along ledges that will zap any birds that step on them. There’s even a Mylar balloon with a scary eye pattern filled with helium floating off one building on Massachusetts Avenue. Judy didn’t think it would work, but it proved surprisingly effective.