Shreveport surprised me by its strong resemblance to Reno, Nevada. I’m not sure what I was expecting on my first visit to Louisiana, but a casino on every block wasn’t it. We met up with our photographer, Red, and checked into our hotel.
The next morning, we bought our hunting licenses and set out to find our hunting ground. I was stunned at the price of a nonresident hunting and fishing license — thirty dollars a day to hunt small game and another five dollars to fish. I swallowed hard and dropped more than a hundred dollars for the privilege of hunting giant rats for the next three days (with a little fishing on the side).
It was a thirty-minute drive out of the city to where we’d be staying on Caddo Lake, which straddles the northwest border between Texas and Louisiana and is home to alligators, gar, largemouth bass, snapping turtles, catfish, cottonmouths, and wading birds of all sorts. Our host, Jarrett Carter, has a spare cottage built beside his family’s main home only about a hundred yards from the lake. He graciously allowed us to sack out in his cottage for as long as we needed to find and shoot some nutria.
Michael, my professional trapper contact, pulled up in front of the cottage in his truck full of traps, and we walked along the shore discussing the finer points of nutria hunting. He used traps for most of the nutria hunting he did for clients, but he thought shooting would work, too. He was pretty sure they’d float after being shot in the water. He also confirmed my hunch about some nutria tracks I’d seen along the shore, and pointed out some other signs that I’d missed: for example, a small mound of soil and vegetation near the water with tracks around it. Nutria construct these mounds and sit on them at night. It’s not clear why they do this; some trappers believe the nutes are using the mounds for scent marking, to communicate with other nutria. They also seem to prefer to feed while standing on top of them. On later hunts I usually found one of these mounds wherever there were other signs of heavy nutria traffic.
Deep scrapes in the grass were the result of nutria feeding on the lawn, Michael thought. We found marks on the sides of cypress trees where they had clawed off strips of bark. Once I was tuned in to them, I saw signs of nutria everywhere.
As sunset approached, Michael left me with the very valuable loan of a pair of high-tech flashlights. Each light emits a special green laser beam that nocturnal animals don’t seem to react to. These handheld lasers would enable us to illuminate our prey long enough to get off a shot.
The three of us were feeling pretty good as the sun went down. We sat on the comfortable porch looking out to the water. Every few minutes, someone would scan the shoreline with the laser while Jeff or I held a rifle ready to shoot. This seemed like a grand way of hunting nutria. New Orleans was as good as ours. Jeff and Red had the air of men who had struck out on a great adventure, and I couldn’t blame them.
Yet the critters never chose to appear. After a night of unsuccessful hunting punctuated by flashbulbs from Red’s camera, we packed it in at three in the morning. Waking up in the full heat of a Louisiana summer, we spent part of the afternoon fishing to kill time until dusk, at which time I started asking everyone in sight about hunting nutria. The neighbor helping to stain the deck on Jarrett’s parents’ house had a hot tip on where to find some nutria for sure. He gave us directions to a drainage canal in a backwater area of the swamp a few miles away, on pipeline land owned by Citgo. He assured me that nobody would care about some nutria hunting.
At this point, I should clarify what the reality is regarding the limits on nutria hunting in Louisiana. In theory, as I said, there’s a season and bag limits on anything but private land with verified damage. In practice, though, people just want the nutria gone and they welcome any effort to clear them out. I spoke with professional nuisance-wildlife trappers in several parishes, local hunters, game wardens, and at least one sheriff’s deputy and the opinion was universal. As long as you aren’t in someone’s backyard, in a park, or in a wildlife management area out of season, nobody cares. They just want the nutria dead.
The official regulatory view of nutria in Louisiana is oddly conflicted, a result of opinions changing over time. When it first showed up in the wild, the nutria was seen as a beneficial natural resource. Trappers in the 1950s had it designated as a fur-bearer, which automatically qualified it for inclusion in all sorts of rules and restrictions designed to allow a fur-bearing species to be hunted in a limited way that ensures its continued presence.
Over the next few decades, it started to become clear that nutria were going to be an ecological disaster. The Army Corps of Engineers found levees riddled with holes and burrows that made them vulnerable to collapse after flooding. Conservationists noticed nutria’s negative effect on native wildlife. Even though the value of nutria pelts was steadily dropping (on a good day, they now go for around five dollars apiece), the old-time trappers didn’t want them to stop being regulated as fur-bearers.
The result was a mixed bag of regulations. On the one hand, Louisiana offers a bounty program for nutria killed by hunters registered through its program. The state also allows the animals to be killed without limit on private land. On the other hand, on public land and waterways there are official bag limits and seasons that were designed to ensure that the species could recover from the hunting of the previous season.
What I found happening in real life is that the fur-bearer status is being ignored by both hunters and law-enforcement agents in most areas. Although one hopes to see sensible laws that are followed and enforced with consistency, Louisiana has a political process that is notorious for corruption, and perhaps what goes on is the best that can be hoped for.
We drove to the canal to see whether the backwater area Jarrett’s neighbor had mentioned was accessible by boat. After spending a long time hunting the bank of that canal by the road and catching a glimpse of at least one nutria, we decided to come back after dark. By boat.
Jarrett’s flat-bottomed jon boat wasn’t very big. It could hold two people comfortably and had accommodated three of us with fishing rods only with careful arrangement and balancing of bodies. After rounding up a fresh battery, we’d be able to use the trolling motor, which would be essential for the three miles of water we had to cross to reach the swampy backwater intended as our hunting ground. But that also meant a lot more weight.
We needed Jarrett on board to navigate us to and from the swamp. Lake Caddo covers more than twenty-four thousand acres and has numerous inlets, swamps, and creeks in which to get helplessly lost. Although man-made, it’s big enough and wild enough to be considered a serious candidate for Sasquatch habitat. Hundreds of Bigfoot sightings have been reported around Lake Caddo, according to the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy.
Considering the total weight and bulk of people and gear, I suggested we leave Red, the photographer, behind. That idea was not well received by Red, so we all piled into the boat, which was already filled with guns, gear, battery, and motor. We had barely three inches of freeboard between the surface of the water and the top of the boat. One good wave from a passing power boat and we could be in real trouble.
A warm breeze picked up as we quietly motored out into the middle of the lake. I sat in the bow with my shotgun, one of Michael’s magic green lasers, and a flashlight. Still far from where we could hope to spot any nutria, I flipped on the flashlight and pointed it into the water. Fish and turtles were illuminated, often only inches from my light.
Long, pale gar of two and three feet long slipped past me like reptilian ghosts. A carp looked startled and bumped into the front of the boat as it fled.
Behind me, Jeff and Jarrett chatted about guitars. Every now and then, the motor would sputter out for no apparent reason and Jarrett would fiddle with it until it got going again.
Sometimes we found ourselves within patches of giant salvinia, an invasive aquatic plant that floats on the surface in clumps. Native to Brazil, it, like so many other invasive species, is thought to have ended up in the wild after it was imported for use as an ornamenta
l plant in aquariums and ponds. The stuff forms patches that each cover several acres on Lake Caddo; when we found ourselves entering one, we had to shut off the motor to avoid fouling the propeller. There was nothing to do except paddle manually through it. We left the open water and moved among a number of cypress trees growing up from the water. A dilapidated duck blind was built around one of them, and this marked the rough boundary of the swamp where the nutria might be found.
By this time, I was figuring out some of the behavioral patterns of the nutria on this lake. Open grassy areas like the one behind Jarrett’s cottage provide good feeding grounds but aren’t a suitable place for nutria to live. The gentle slope of the shore doesn’t provide much of an embankment to burrow into; therefore, the nutria were making a pretty long commute to feed on people’s lawns. It seemed likely that they were maintaining burrows on the steep sides of creeks and drainage canals that feed into the lake. The tracks in the mud behind Jarrett’s house were of different sizes and had been made on different days, suggesting the nutria made regular visits.
This means there were three types of places to ambush nutria: where they live, where they eat, and along the path between those places. The theory wasn’t all that different from what I’d experienced hunting whitetail deer or any other animal with predictable habits in a well-defined territory.
It would be easy to miss commuting nutria swimming across the open water, but in the closer confines of the swamps and creeks, there was less water to watch and it would be easier to spot nutria on the move. This was why we were steering the boat into the swamp.
Now considering the hunt to be on, I loaded my shotgun but kept the safety switch engaged. I had chosen the shotgun because I would probably be shooting at a moving target from a moving boat. Shotguns throw out a cloud of pellets that make it easier to intercept a moving object than it would be with, say, a single bullet from a rifle. I also carried a loaded revolver on my hip for the remote but real possibility of an alligator attack.
I turned to say something to Jeff when suddenly a flash went off from the photographer’s camera. It blinded me, and for the next few minutes I saw nothing but floating balls of light. This happened several times during the boat ride.
We slipped past a snake coiled around the branch of a cypress tree and heard a bird hooting from far away. The water grew more and more shallow. We were now in honest-to-goodness swamp with a cacophony of insects and frogs. There were little clicking sounds and cicada-like whirring and the deep honking of bullfrogs. I had seen swamps in the daytime, but never anything like this, with the promise of alligators and hundred-pound snapping turtles — maybe even Bigfoot himself. Nutria aside, I’d have been happy to spend the rest of the night just sitting there and listening to wildlife going about their business in the swamp.
Something the size and shape of a grown nutria slipped into the water from a hillock of grass. I had the gun up to my shoulder in time but was unable to identify the species with enough certainty to take a shot.
The weeds became too thick for the propeller, so we paddled and poled our way forward. (At several key spots, the butt of my shotgun made an excellent bargepole.) Finally, we were well and truly grounded. At the mouth of the system of canals and creeks where we knew there were nutria, we could go no farther on account of how low the flat-bottomed boat sat in the water. There were simply too many people with too much weight. Thus, we turned around and went back to the cottage.
After a few hours of sleep, I sat on the porch and considered the situation. Time was slipping away. We’d seen nutria from the road and knew they were in there. We had to get serious and go in there any way we could.
We drove to the spot where Jarrett had pointed out the nutria the day before and started scouting on foot. I found a number of burrow systems of various ages in the canal along the road and realized that I’d found where they live. I hiked farther into the swamp and discovered an old beaver lodge that appeared to have been taken over by nutria. Lots of nutria tracks, a vegetative mound by the water, and years-old telltale beaver chewing signs on the trees.
I decided to set up an ambush from a dozen yards across the creek from the vegetative mound. If we sat there long enough, eventually a nutria would haul itself out of the water and make its way to the mound. This marked the beginning of a kind of hunting that I’m accustomed to for deer, but it didn’t appeal to my journalist friends.
Hunting from a boat is a great adventure. Stalking the shoreline on foot in the dark with a rifle in hand speaks to the Tom Sawyer hidden within each of us. Sitting still from a concealed position in the swamp for hours on end in silence is an exercise that most people would find excruciating.
Hunting deer, however, had prepared me well for this. I’ve spent many a day alone, waiting in ambush from dawn to dusk. If you do this enough times, eventually one of two things happens: Either you go home and turn on the TV and swear off hunting altogether or you learn to cross into the Zen of hunting. Your mind enters an altered state of hyperawareness, and boredom is simply not an issue. Time ceases to have any meaning; you really can’t tell the difference between fifteen minutes and an hour.
I can’t tell you for sure how many days we hunted that swamp. A strange odyssey began during which I rarely slept more than four hours in any day or night. I became an almost wholly nocturnal creature.
During the afternoon, we patrolled on foot from the road. The nutria usually woke up around then and would sit near their burrows feeding, grooming, or sunning themselves. For these excursions, I carried my Ruger target pistol in its holster on my belt. Several times I managed to get off a shot or two before the nutria spooked into the water. Sometimes I was convinced that I’d hit an animal, yet nothing floated to the surface, as Michael said it should. I contemplated wading into the water to search, but the alligator situation coupled with my lack of health insurance discouraged that folly.
One night, an hour after dusk, as Jeff was scanning with a green laser flashlight and I held the shotgun, I saw what was definitely a nutria swimming from the burrow toward the open lake.
“Jeff, move the light on him,” I whispered.
The nutria swam past the unmoving beam of light, apparently oblivious.
“Jeff, move the light so I can take the shot!”
The light remained fixed, and the nutria was gone. I turned to Jeff to ask what the hell he was doing and saw that he had a finger in each ear, well protected against both the expected blast of the shotgun and every word I had said.
Most of our hunts were flubbed by this sort of thing. Red would pop a flashbulb or Jeff would start talking loudly. I worked out a technique for holding and aiming the flashlight with my left hand, which also held the fore end of the shotgun.
Despite my growing frustration with them, and our joint disappointment at not getting our nutria, we agreed to have another go. We would spend another day or so hunting, then plan B would be to drive farther south, to Baton Rouge or someplace else where the populations of nutria are denser. The tough thing about plan B was that we didn’t know anyone or any place to hunt anywhere other than where we were now.
All of the pieces were there for us to bag some nutria: I had the boat and the gear, and I had those rodents patterned. What I needed were hours of ambush at night without interruption.
That night, as the sun went down, a parade of swamp wildlife began to emerge. Something small and furry sat by the water’s edge for a moment before slipping under the surface. A pair of raccoons, large and small, crept along the bank. They didn’t react in the slightest to the beam of green light aimed at them. Another lone raccoon appeared later and stopped to grab a crayfish from the edge of the water. An owl flew from tree to tree and hooted.
Some sort of animal came swimming toward me, only its head exposed, with a broad V of wake behind it. I shouldered my gun and began to swing on it before realizing that this was almost certainly a mink. I lowered the gun and watched it disappear.
I had a nutria dea
d to rights from ambush that night. It was swimming and was within a dozen yards of me when I squeezed the trigger. My left hand couldn’t steady the shotgun well, because it was also holding the flashlight; as a result, the shotgun leapt up vertically in my hands. A geyser of water erupted, and when I came out of the flash and recoil, there were only ripples on the surface.
We waited for the nutria to float up in the murky water, but it never did. I searched up and down the creek and found no evidence of it. As I walked back to where Jeff and Red were waiting for me, however, I saw through the woods some dark shape that was roughly man-height. It immediately ran off into the swamp. A black bear? A shy human? Bigfoot? I’ll never know. . . .
Dawn found us back at the shore behind the cottage, waiting for feeding activity at first light. Nothing appeared. I was very tired and spirits were low all around, but I was still happy about having had a night in the swamp, observing the nocturnal goings-on. It was strange: The longer we spent out there, the more frustrated I became, yet the more I appreciated sitting in that swamp and the more I looked forward to seeing what tomorrow night would bring.
The next day we were online, madly searching for trappers or nuisance-wildlife specialists who could help us find a nutria at the last minute. I left messages for several people. Meanwhile, I was able to get hold of a French chef who specialized in cooking nutria. Based in Baton Rouge, Philippe Parola could talk to us intelligently about nutria and thought he might be able to find one in the freezer for us to taste.
Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Page 11
