Things turned ugly once we got into the bush. A wicked maze of thorns and low-branched bushes stood in our way, intermingled with fallen trees from past storms. I pulled out a pair of garden pruners from my pack and began clipping my way through the scrub. It was rough, but I knew it was unlikely that any thorns would kill me. In fact, I must confess to taking a certain bizarre pleasure in wading through the worst sorts of swamps and briars when circumstances call for it. There’s a kind of freedom in being soaked to the bone, filthy, and scratched all to hell. Maybe it’s because, barring a calamity, things aren’t likely to get any worse.
Bob, on the other hand, pointed out that he was a good six inches taller than I am and roughly two hundred years older. It was a lot more difficult for him to get through the route I was taking. Within ten minutes of pushing through the scrub, he refused to go any farther, and we turned around to find another way to our destination.
In chronological years, Bob is only about twenty-five years older. He studied field biology in college before switching to major in wildlife illustration. He did the illustrations for my last book. It’s handy being able to cart around your illustrator with you on the road; all you have to do is promise him all kinds of fishing and wild pigs and some adventures.
After wading across what can best be described as a shallow pond and walking a mile or so through marsh grasses, we found what may have once been an access road to the dunes, but which had been flooded by the recent rain. Because we were already soaked, we slogged down the long, narrow marsh into the general area of the tertiary dunes.
The dunes were crisscrossed with pig tracks and signs of their rooting. This is one of the problems with wild swine in a habitat like this; they dig through the dunes to eat sand crabs and the roots of some of the plants that hold the dunes together. The fear is that this action, over time, will lead to the destruction of those dunes and perhaps to the disappearance of the entire landmass into the sea.
It was clear that there had been pigs out here all night. Set yourself up in the dark on one of those ridges with a rifle and a spotlight, and you’d have no trouble knocking the population down. But that isn’t allowed, despite the absence of any houses to worry about hitting. I wondered why.
It was a beautiful place. There aren’t many spots here on the East Coast where you can walk among the dunes by the ocean without seeing a trace of humans. Instead there were sea oats and raccoon tracks and the thick smell of salt and scrub pines and a touch of honest seaside decay on the wind.
After an hour and a half of ambush and a few attempts to drive any hidden pigs out of the brush and into Bob’s line of fire, we packed it in. Hunting pigs in a place like this, in the middle of the day, was turning out to be a fool’s errand. As their tracks showed us, once the sun was well up in the sky, the pigs moved down into the same tangled mess of thorns and scrub that had turned us back initially. Visibility in that environment is limited to five or six feet, and it would be impossible to kill the pigs there without baiting them into an ambush.
We were required to check out of the wildlife preserve at the same utility building where we had checked in. I asked one of the rangers if anyone had taken a pig. She said no. A uniformed man whom I hadn’t seen before was seated behind one of the folding tables, and he mentioned that someone had brought in a nice deer.
Looking closer at his uniform, I saw that he wasn’t with Fish and Wildlife. He looked to be about my age, maybe a little older. I walked over to talk to him.
“Say, are you the biologist here to take samples of the pigs when people bring them in?”
“Yeah, when anyone has one for us. We don’t have any yet today.”
“What do you look for when one comes in?”
“Any kind of disease that might affect the native wildlife — brucellosis, that sort of thing.”
“Well, if you did find a disease like that, what would you do?”
The biologist laughed. “Well, that’s the question, all right. We’re not really sure. We have a budget to study the pigs, but it can’t be used for eradication.”
“You’re with the USDA?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re here to help figure out how to get rid of the pigs?”
“We’re trying to.”
“So what’s the plan, aside from the managed hunts like what’s happening today?”
“It’s just these hunts for now.”
“How many pigs do you figure are here right now?”
“Probably about three hundred, just within the refuge borders.”
“How many did you kill last year, among all of the hunters you had out here for all of the managed hunts?”
“Fifteen.”
“Only fifteen?”
The USDA guy sighed and shrugged. “Yeah, I know. With pigs, we need to be knocking out at least seventy-five percent of the population each year just to keep their numbers steady. They have so many litters every year.”
From what Bob and I had just experienced, it wasn’t hugely surprising that so few pigs had been killed. By not allowing hunters to check out the territory in advance, the people from Fish and Wildlife were just dropping people off in the dark (literally and figuratively), letting them wander around and essentially educate the pigs. Hunters never had a chance to pattern the pigs or predict where they’d be.
The more I thought about it, the more I imagined how things could be done differently. If the USDA would stop having these big cattle calls that bring out guys like me and just find a few local hunters (as Boca Grande had done in hiring George Cera to deal with their iguana situation), it would be a much better situation. The hunters could be vetted, put through some sort of short ecology course, and given twenty-four-hour access to the property, year-round, with whatever weapons they wanted. Then there’d be hunters who’d get to know where the pigs were at any given time and they could really start killing them.
I mentioned this idea to the USDA guy.
“We can’t let people come in here year-round to hunt,” he said. “It would be a safety hazard for the researchers.”
“What researchers?”
“The people studying the effects of the pigs on the habitat.”
When I was in college, fifteen years ago, I actually did fieldwork on the pigs of the Back Bay and gathered data on the damage the pigs were doing to the local ecosystem. I wondered what the USDA still needed to learn after fifteen years that they hadn’t already observed. The pigs were clearly a problem and needed to be hunted to keep their numbers in check.
“We don’t have much of an eradication budget,” the USDA guy said, “but we do have a pretty good budget to study the problem. If we don’t use the research budget this year, then we won’t get it next year.”
Essentially, people couldn’t come in to shoot the invasive species, because that would present a danger to the people who were there to study the invasive species. And they couldn’t just stop the studies, because then they wouldn’t get the money to keep, well, studying it.
As it turned out, the guy was actually a biologist with the USDA, on loan to the state game department for the hunt, and didn’t know any of the state hunting regulations. Suddenly it became all too clear why the morning sign-ups were such a mess. The feds had lent their man to the state, and he was now nominally representing the state to the feds as they hashed out state hunting-license issues. Except that none of them had any idea what the others were talking about.
With the logic as this USDA biologist presented it, there was no scenario in which they would actually be willing to kill the invasive pigs. They were there to study the damage the pigs were doing, simply in order to document it. That documentation would be used to obtain more funding to study how bad the problem was. At no point does anyone involved in this process actually make an effort to solve the problem. That would be counterproductive in terms of perpetuating the system. Once you solve the problem, it’s no longer there to be studied. Each step, taken on its own, s
ort of made sense. I could understand how each individual in the system came to do what he was doing in good faith, including the biologist at Back Bay. But as a whole, it added up to policy that seemed to accomplish nothing.
Bob and I changed out of our wet clothes in the brush behind where we had parked the truck. We drove home pondering how the strategy for combating an ecologically dangerous species could have evolved into something this absurd. There had to be a better way to fight feral pigs.
In search of that better way, I got in touch with Daniel Gentry, of Perry, Georgia, and arranged to visit him for a few days to see how they hunt pigs in the South. We’d found him through a friend of a friend of someone Bob discovered in an Internet forum about tractors. Neither of us had ever met the guy, but I’d had a pretty good string of luck with driving hundreds and even thousands of miles to meet up with strangers in order to hunt odd animals.
The leaves on the trees were fiery shades of orange, red, and yellow when Bob and I left home, and as we drove south the fall landscape turned back to summer. The countryside grew greener and the air warmer. Signs for Starbucks disappeared and those for Waffle House took their place. Wisps of Spanish moss dangled from the trees and filtered the light of the setting sun.
We found Daniel’s place at around eight at night. I knocked on the door and there he was, ready to go, in his navy blue military-style trousers with a pistol strapped to his hip. He looked to be around twenty years old, thin, lean, and serious. After hellos, he handed me an AR-15 with a night-vision scope. This guy was all business! We walked out back to his fifty-yard range so I could try out the rifle and he could see how I shot.
This is an important ritual among people who are hunting together for the first time. I’ve worked as a hunting guide and I know the feeling Daniel probably had. When some unknown person shows up to hunt with you, you’ve got to worry about what he can do with a rifle. You ask yourself, “Does this person know what he’s doing? What are his limitations? Will he do foolish, unsafe things with the gun?” A good host or guide needs to find out these things before the hunting starts. Because of this, some type of seemingly informal shooting usually precedes a hunt among strangers. We act as though this ritual is casual and fun, but the reality is that this is an essential test of a newcomer.
As we approached the targets, Daniel stopped short and motioned for Bob and me to stop. I saw something white and round in the grass in front of us. Daniel drew his pistol and fired with lightning speed. The white thing jumped straight up in the air about three feet and then disappeared into the brush.“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Armadillo. That’s definitely a varmint around here. They go digging holes all over the place. If you see one, you kill it.”
We set up our targets and sighted in the night-vision scope on the AR-15. The AR platform is a semiautomatic rifle that was the basis for the better-known M-16 assault rifle used by the U.S. military. Most ARs and M-16s shoot the .223 Winchester cartridge, which is small enough to be illegal in most states to use on deer. It doesn’t have enough oomph to do the job reliably.
Most of my hunting experience has been with bolt-action rifles, so the AR felt alien in my hands — heavy and awkward. For someone who spent a few tours of duty carrying a similar weapon in Iraq or Afghanistan, this thing would probably feel perfect. In fact, I know several veterans who have come home from months or years of combat patrol duty and find that their hands and eyes mesh with the workings of an AR more naturally than with any other shooting platform. To me, it felt like shouldering a weed whacker. I wished that I could hunt with one of the deer rifles I’d brought along, but the night-vision scope, which trumped all else, happened to be attached to the AR.
The pigs around Perry are mostly nocturnal. Fortunately, Georgia allows pigs to be hunted at night. In the daylight, you might stumble across one every now and then, but it’s not something you can count on. Even in a full moon, it isn’t easy to see — and clearly identify — a pig through an ordinary rifle scope. This meant that we would be depending heavily on the night-vision scope.
We started out on foot, working our way around a farm of more than six hundred acres, where Daniel regularly hunts. I am accustomed to checking the wind right away when I start hunting, but Daniel pointed out that when hunting at night, we’d have to keep checking the moon as well. Not only did we need to hunt into or crosswise to the wind in order to keep the pigs from scenting us, but we also needed to avoid having the newly risen moon directly behind us, so that we wouldn’t be silhouetted. This was a whole new world of hunting for me.
The world around us was all grays and blacks and whites in the moonlight, which brightened the trees and the sky and the scattered ramshackle farm buildings. We walked single file: Daniel in front, I in the middle, then Bob. In the dim light of a cloudy moon, we couldn’t always see if there was something we could trip over or crunch down on and make an unfortunately loud noise.
“Walk like a cowboy,” Daniel instructed.
It was good advice. The fabric of our clothing could also make a noise when we walked with our legs too close together. Walking like a cowboy, with our legs apart and stepping high, we moved more quietly.
We walked a few miles like this in the dark, stopping every so often to scan the fields and pastures for pigs. We crossed over a fence and walked around a small pond, when Daniel and Bob saw, practically simultaneously, a pig-sized black blob. At about fifty yards away, I had an easy shot. I shouldered the AR and lined up the scope. With the night vision, I could see that this was definitely the correct prey.
“You want me to shoot now?” I whispered to Daniel.
“No, wait.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea why, but this was Daniel’s show and I figured he knew what he was doing, or I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. I watched through the scope with an itchy trigger finger as the pig trotted away across the field. It crossed the path we had taken, sniffed the ground, and took off toward the woods.
“Why’d you have me hold back?”
“Because that was just the one pig,” Daniel said, as if I’d asked something ridiculous. “As soon as we fire a shot, every pig around here is going to disappear for the next four or five hours. You shoot just the one and you aren’t gonna get any more.”
Daniel was right, in terms of what he was trying to accomplish. I had come to Georgia mostly just wanting to knock out a pig to cook and write about. But Daniel’s job as a steward of that land is to remove as many pigs as possible. Sometimes that means passing on the one easy pig in hopes of killing half a dozen at one go later in the night.
We hunted on foot for hours, slowly circling the farm several times. After a while we decided to try another tactic, to cover more ground.
Daniel started his pickup truck with Bob in the cab and me in the bed. He drove out to another farm that he had access to and started driving up and down the access roads. We cruised through enormous fields with massive irrigation systems. I stood up and leaned forward over the back of the cab with the rifle on my shoulder, elbow resting on the roof as I bounced with every rock and bump in the dirt road. The gray-and-white moonlight spectacle of fields and woods flew past as I scanned the tree line with the night-vision scope. I wondered if this was what it was like to be in the Taliban.
We stopped at the end of a long field in front of a gate for which Daniel didn’t have the key. As the three of us discussed where to go next, I spied a sizable group of pigs in the next field, on the other side of the gate. There were so many of them, I scarcely believed that this could really be a herd of wild animals. But it was. Thirty or forty pigs all eating in the middle of the field, no more than a hundred and fifty yards away.
With any of my own bolt-action deer rifles, this would have been a simple business. Using a steady rest, I could pick off at least three of them before they were gone. But I wasn’t hunting with a deer rifle. I was hunting with an AR-15 that I’d met just that night and shot only at fifty
yards. The scope was mounted so high off the barrel that a tremendous amount of holdover would be required for a shot at that distance, as opposed to the fifty yards we’d zeroed the scope at.
Daniel and I whispered in rapid consultation. We had to get closer. The wind was in our favor, at least for the moment. We decided to make an approach from around the tree line at the edge of the field in which the pigs stood.
Bob stayed back at the truck as Daniel and I moved out. We couldn’t see the pigs during the first stage of our approach, but we knew where they were likely to be. The moon had sunk out of sight and we dared not turn on flashlights, which would give away our position. We navigated using the trick of looking away from what we really needed to see, shifting our attention to our peripheral vision, which has superior night vision to that of the center of the eye.
This was fine adventure now. The thick Georgia night air was in my nostrils. I felt good and whole and alive as I sneaked up on feral pigs in the dark of night.
When we’d gotten to the point in the tree line that should have put us about thirty yards from the pigs, they weren’t there. The herd was on the move, steadily grazing its way down the field. The pigs didn’t seem spooked and probably had no idea we were there, but we weren’t much closer to them than when we had started.
Faster, we moved down the tree line in pursuit. I saw the leaders of the herd heading straight toward the opening of a trail into the woods on the other side of the long field. The herd was still some hundred and fifty yards away, but this was as good as it was going to get before they were all gone.
I dropped to one knee and brought the heavy beast of a rifle up to my shoulder, resting my left elbow on my knee to steady my aim. My right thumb disengaged the unfamiliar safety switch. I found a pig that wasn’t moving at the moment, aimed the low-magnification scope just behind the ear, and opened fire.
All hell broke loose among the pigs. The gun smoke momentarily obscured my vision through the sensitive night-vision scope. The herd broke into two; some headed straight for the woods, and others ran to the opposite side of the field. One pig, probably the one I had aimed for, was standing still. I fired again, three or four times, peppering both that pig and others near it. And suddenly, with a whole damned herd of feral swine on the move in front of me, the gun jammed.
Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Page 4
