We approached a half-moon-shaped hole in the ground, and I noted the spiderwebs across the top of the hole, which, I surmised aloud, indicated that nothing large could be living there at the moment. As we looked around for the probable occupant of the hole, Jeff spotted a surprisingly large gopher tortoise staring at us from the dappled sunlight under a tree. The tortoise looked at each of us in turn, seemingly unafraid and already bored with us. (I suppose if you’ve been facing down big, black-and-gray lizards with teeth like those of a prehistoric crocodile for the last ten years, you’re not likely to be easily scared off.) After a minute, it ambled into the hole I’d insisted was uninhabited.
In Florida, the native gopher tortoise is a keystone species — that is, a plant or animal that many other species depend on for survival. It happens to be a keystone for some three hundred other species. It digs holes up to forty feet long, in locations that don’t tend to cause erosion or environmental damage but that do provide homes for many other animals. There are also fruits, such as the gopher apple and the saw palmetto, that the gopher tortoise helps to reproduce. It spreads the seeds in its droppings, thus aiding propagation. The gopher tortoise tends to excrete seeds intact and ready to germinate more often than do many of the other animals that eat the same fruit.
We saw many gopher tortoises during the three days I spent in Boca Grande, but none of them had a shell smaller than about seven or eight inches long. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why: The iguanas were eating all of the eggs and hatchlings before they could grow large enough to be safe from most predation. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that if this keeps up, the species will disappear from the island.
Other species are in danger as well. George told me he once witnessed a nest of baby scrub jays (an endangered species) being cleaned out by an iguana. By the time he returned to the nest with a pellet rifle, it was too late. It isn’t known how many species of bird are at risk to spiny-tail predation; the research simply hasn’t been done. Given that this lizard is equally comfortable in treetops and in underground tunnels, a wide variety of bird species could be in grave danger of extinction.
On our second day of cruising the streets and culs-de-sac of Boca Grande, it was my turn to shoot. In Florida, no special license is required to hunt animals that are designated as nuisance species, and the air rifles we were using are exempt from the prohibitions on discharging a firearm in town. At first, it seemed absurd to refer to cruising around in a golf cart as hunting. But after having shot iguanas with George, I can honestly say that this qualified. There’s a knack to it. Understanding what type of environmental “structure” (types of plants and proximity to hiding places, for example) the lizards prefer is most of the challenge.
Positively identifying one is a challenge; after a while, everything started to look like an iguana: shadows, sticks, even figments of my imagination. George’s trick is to stop looking for an iguana. Instead, he looks for something that doesn’t belong: a shape or a shadow that doesn’t quite fit with patterns in the landscape. Sometimes that shape is a chunk of palm-tree bark on the ground; at other times it’s the broken end of a branch protruding from one of the banyan trees that have turned several streets on the island into haunting, leafy caves. And every now and then, it just might be a big invasive lizard.
These days, it’s less likely that the out-of-place shadow will prove to be a spiny-tail. That’s because George has single-handedly killed more than sixteen thousand of the lizards on Gasparilla. Some lucky town employee was assigned to count the fruits of George’s bounty from a ripe-smelling trash can at the end of every day. By the time I arrived, the once-booming population had been reduced to a relatively few adults and a great many of the diminutive green juveniles: enough to bring back the problem in a big way in just a few years, if the hunting pressure lets up.
We cruised around looking for my first kill. It was early in the day and the action was slow. Iguanas don’t seem to be out and about reliably until between noon and 1 p.m. A pickup truck passed us heading the other way and George glared at it.
“USDA guys,” George said, furrowing the brow of his shaved head. “Those guys have no frickin’ clue what they’re doing. Nothing but a pain in my ass. Guess how many lizards they take, on average, each day they’re out there.”
He shifted his bulk in the seat to stare at them.
“Seven.” He answered his own question, disgusted.
“And how many were you taking right before the town put them in charge?” I asked.
“Around thirty.”
I couldn’t imagine what the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be doing in a small town on an island fueled by the businesses of tourism and tarpon fishing, with nary a farm or ranch in sight.
What happened was this: After George had just about pounded the spiny-tails into submission, the USDA decided it wanted in on the action. During the last few decades, the agency has managed to expand the scope of its funding and efforts against invasive species beyond farms and into suburban neighborhoods, state parks, and pretty much anywhere else it can find them. In theory, this should be a good thing. In the case of Gasparilla Island, what it meant was that the guy who had proved that he was able to dramatically reduce the population was replaced by agents of a much less efficient government bureaucracy.
George Cera had lost the town’s iguana-control contract after the USDA muscled in and convinced the local government to end the open-bidding process. Yet here he was, still cruising around, removing iguanas from properties whose owners had granted him permission. He had technically become a volunteer — he wasn’t getting paid a dime for this. He believed it was the right thing to do.
We saw the USDA guys many times during my visit. They drove around in their pickup truck as fast as the speed limit would allow. George cruised slowly in his golf cart, watching every detail and pulling the maneuverable cart along paths too small for a conventional vehicle. With no windshield or doors to impede a shot, he could quickly take out a spiny-tail that would have spooked had he tried to get out of the cart. It was easy to understand some of the reasons that George had been so successful during his tenure as the town lizard catcher. Watching the routine of the USDA team, I understood why there were now so many juvenile iguanas darting across sidewalks and pouncing on anoles.
One of those plentiful and charismatic green juveniles soon offered itself as my first target. It was sunning itself on a brick sidewalk, and cocked its head and bobbed up and down in challenge to my presence. At a scant fifteen yards away, a shot like that would be a cinch with a .22 on a squirrel or other small mammal. The only thing was that I wasn’t using a .22 and my prey wasn’t a mammal. I was forced to hunt with an air rifle that shoots .17-caliber pellets and I had to put one of those pellets directly into the lizard’s brain or upper spine.
One of the funny things about reptiles is that they take a little longer than mammals do to acknowledge the fact that they’re dead.
A snake once made a nuisance of itself in my house. After killing, gutting, and skinning it, I put the meat directly on the charcoal grill (dipped in barbecue sauce, it was excellent). While the snake was cooking, I observed that its heart continued to beat on the ground for a full hour after being removed. Many reptiles have this shocking resilience. A bullet through the lungs that would take down most other animals may inspire an iguana to run a hundred yards into a mangrove swamp and never be recovered.
This is a problem for two reasons. First, every hunter has an obligation to ensure the least amount of suffering for the prey. Second, my intent is to cook and eat the animals I hunt, and that doesn’t work if I can’t find them after I shoot them.
I figured the only way to be absolutely certain the iguana wouldn’t run off after it was hit would be to destroy the central nervous system at once, with a shot either to the brain or to the upper spine. In this case, the animal might still be moving its limbs reflexively, but not in any deliberate way, and certainly the motion wouldn’t take it
any farther afield.
I’d seen George take many shots like this off-hand (that is, without any solid object or special position to steady the rifle), but I didn’t think I could match his shooting skills. I got down on one knee, sighted on the back of the iguana’s head, and squeezed the trigger.
The small green lizard thrashed around briefly, then lay still. I picked it up and smacked its head against the sidewalk, just in case. This proved unnecessary, as I had sent the pellet straight through the iguana’s head.
I felt a little sad holding the lifeless five-inch body. It was kind of cute, and I understood why people took them home from pet stores. Nobody would look at this creature and imagine that it would eventually turn into a miniature dinosaur with virtual blades on its tail, devouring nestlings and baby gopher tortoises.
That day, I took other, larger iguanas as well. I never failed to hit my target in the head, although my ability to visualize the position of the brain in three dimensions from any angle could not equal George’s.
In one case my lizard, a barely mature male of about fourteen inches, started to bolt from a shot that was a bit off to one side and George anchored it for me with a shot from his rifle. The creature still managed to scuttle into the hollow center of an old railroad tie during the second or two before it expired. We had hell’s own fun turning the eight-foot-long hunk of wood on end and chopping out the dead iguana with the hatchet that I carry around for just this sort of thing.
We could usually stalk to within twenty yards of a spiny-tail before it bolted. The critters spooked much less easily in the early days of George’s work. Also, hunting iguanas in a densely built-up area like Boca Grande meant that it was often necessary to pass up an easy shot because there was a house nearby. We’d either move on and look for another one or get into position for a safer angle that involved a longer range. Anything over fifty yards is probably asking for trouble on a larger iguana, though. The light .17-caliber pellet loses velocity over distance and might not make a clean kill, even when perfectly aimed.
Hunting iguanas requires more ability as a marksman than most other types of hunting I’ve participated in. For example, to hunt deer, you must be able to place your shot into a circle of about seven inches in diameter. That is roughly the size of the lungs when seen from broadside. Such a shot will reliably kill the deer, and though it may run a few dozen yards before dropping, it’s not usually hard to find. It’s not difficult for a novice hunter to learn to place five consecutive shots into a seven-inch-diameter circle and, as a professional hunting instructor, I’ve rarely encountered anyone who couldn’t do this out to at least fifty yards after an hour of practice.
The target area of an iguana, on the other hand, is much smaller. Even a large spiny-tail has a brain of only about the size of a large marble. It takes a great deal of practice to learn how to shoot that accurately under field conditions. Fortunately, this practice is inexpensive either with a conventional .22 rifle or with the lead pellets used by an air rifle.
Boca Grande was almost deserted during my visit. In the off-season, the island is left to a handful of hardy full-time residents who aren’t in a position to be fussy about the brand of their beer when it costs eighteen bucks for a twelve-pack of the cheap stuff. Island prices hurt, and the four-dollar bridge toll tends to discourage unnecessary trips. You don’t do anything in a hurry in mid-September off the Gulf Coast of Florida, unless it’s on fire or on sale. In-season, the place fills up with the people who own or rent the multimillion-dollar houses that George hunts around. I guess it’s not so bad if you’re the guy selling the eighteen-dollar beer.
Although there weren’t a lot of people around, there was plenty of wildlife. There were large and exotic wading birds of all descriptions: elegant tricolored ibises, snowy egrets, and the same great blue herons that I knew from back home in Virginia. I watched an endangered scrub jay fly across the road between patches of mangroves. Those birds had almost been extirpated from the island when the spiny-tails were at their worst.
George’s girlfriend, Cindy, managed to set us up with one of the only two restaurants still open in Boca Grande during this final stretch of the off-season: South Beach Restaurant, a watering hole that draws maintenance workers, property managers, and the odd bunch of tourists. Jeff and I bellied up to the bar and ordered pints of cold, bitter beer.
The chef, Greg Beano — a round, pleasant middle-aged man with a perpetually serene look on his face — hurried out of the kitchen to introduce himself, and proposed that we turn the iguanas into a plate of tacos. We carried our beers, bags, and a cooler full of almost frozen spiny-tailed iguanas into the hot, loud kitchen and got to work. I took a lizard and set it on a white plastic cutting board. It didn’t look like food so much as a prop from one of the Gremlins movies.
Most of the meat on an iguana is in the limbs and tail. There’s some over the ribs, but unless you’re working with exceptionally large lizards, it’s not likely to be enough to bother chasing for food.
I drew my hunting knife from its sheath and began slicing off the limbs. The bones proved stiffer and tougher than I had expected. For the second time that day, I reached for the hatchet on my belt. I gave the thick hind limb a mighty chop, and it came right off.
“Stay out of the digestive system,” cautioned George. “It will stink all to hell if you go in there. Seriously, don’t even think about gutting it.”
As I chopped off the tail, I did indeed go too high up the body, and the back of the digestive system opened. George was right. The funk was at least as bad as gutting a turkey (which, trust me, can make you think about switching to tofu for Thanksgiving). I carried what was left of the iguana out the back door and chucked it into a trash can.
After we’d butchered all our lizards, we had a pile of scaly, dismembered limbs bearing menacing black claws, mixed with sharply armored tails. This still didn’t look like food. Chef Greg parboiled the limbs and then dunked them immediately into cold water to loosen up the hide. Peeling the skin off the flesh took some time but was easier than, say, picking crabmeat.
With the hide off, we began pulling the meat from the bones and shredding it by hand. We avoided the bright yellow fat, as it has an unpleasant taste and smell. This fat is isolated into tiny pockets around the surface rather than marbled throughout the meat, so it wasn’t difficult to keep it out of our pile of the good stuff.
Pulled from the bone and filling a medium-size bowl, the iguana meat finally looked like food.
Greg whipped up a marinade of lime, cilantro, tequila, and a few spices. He browned the meat in a pan and served the tacos in soft shells with a nice salsa verde. Now it smelled like food.
We sat at a table on the patio with another round of beers, and Greg carried the platter of tacos out to us. With only the slightest hesitation, we each took our first bite. It was pretty good. It was very good. George aptly described it as tasting like chicken with the texture of crab.
Later that night, we sat on plastic lawn chairs in George’s shell-covered driveway as the sun sank over the ocean. I propped up my feet on a cooler full of iguanas and cracked open a beer.
“I wish I never had to kill another living thing,” George remarked, a serious look on his broad, suntanned face. “There’s nothing good about having to do any of this. But I know that for every ctenosaur I shoot, I’m saving hundreds of other native animals. The only thing worse than having to kill sixteen thousand iguanas would be watching all of these other animals go extinct.”
I imagined what the trash cans full of dead, bloody iguanas must have looked and smelled like when George began the task of cleaning up the island. It doesn’t seem likely that a man would create such a mess day after day, for not much more than a living wage, without some greater sense of purpose.
Green Iguanas
With a crash course in lizard hunting under my belt, I said goodbye to my new friends in Boca Grande. My father-in-law, Bob, and I packed the pop-up camper and started the long driv
e from Gasparilla Island down to the Florida Keys.
Rather than deal with the monotony of Alligator Alley, the parkway that cuts across the Everglades from one side of Florida to the other, we took a much smaller road farther south. Route 40 seemed weird and out of the way, which is usually what I’m looking for.
We passed through miles of swampland bordered by tall palm trees, short scrubby pines, and pools of standing water filled with a vast variety of wading birds. Here and there, a billboard or hand-lettered sign advertised airboat tours and guaranteed alligator sightings. Occasionally, we could see buildings through the trees. The first ones we saw were fairly conventional boxes with gabled or flat roofs, but later we started to see roofs that appeared to be made of thatched palm leaves. These were the homes of Seminole Indians, still living on their traditional lands. In the uncompromising swamps of southern Florida, the U.S. Army never managed to push out the last of these people, or round them up the way they did across most of the rest of the continent. Between the saw grass, the snakes, the heat, and the alligators, it takes a special kind of desperation and cunning to stick around.
The Seminole roofs and gator tours gradually gave way to a long stretch of fruit farms and palm-tree nurseries. Route 40 eventually spilled us out into the urban sprawl of Dade County. We met up with Route A1A, of Jimmy Buffett fame, which took us straight down to the Keys. The scenery segued into cheap sandal shops, boat dealers, and chintzy seafood restaurants built to look like boats.
On Big Pine Key, I stood in the office at an RV park. I handed my credit card to the woman behind the counter and subtly tried to get tips about where to hunt.
Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Page 2
