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

by Jackson Landers

  Every boat is a little bit different, depending on what it will be used for and because each is hand-crafted. The boat I rode in was built to be a work platform along remote oil pipelines through the swamps and bayous, so it was relatively wide, flush-decked, and less maneuverable in tight quarters than would be a boat built for hunting.

  A small alligator watched us from the water as David, Philippe, and I each stepped aboard a different airboat with our respective pilots. I rode with Daniel Cupp at the helm. Daniel was born and raised here and has been driving airboats around this very swamp for more than three decades.

  The roar of an airplane engine a few feet behind us, separated from us by only a wire cage, made conversation difficult. We pushed along a broad channel, quickly gathering speed. Snowy white ibises and blue-gray herons took to the air as we approached.

  Daniel steered us into a narrow channel, where we entered a maze of cypress. The surface of the water was like an undulating lawn covered with algae, duckweed, and grasses that grew from the slightest clump of floating debris. Water hyacinths, occasionally in bloom, bobbed along. Brought from South America by aquaculture hobbyists, water hyacinth has taken over large stretches of water in Louisiana and is perhaps the worst invasive aquatic plant in the country. It impedes water flow, creates ideal microhabitat for mosquitoes, and blocks light from reaching native plants under the surface. Low oxygen levels result, killing fish where the plant is particularly dense.

  We slowed as we approached a low-slung cabin with a tattered Confederate flag flying from the gabled roof. We’d arrived at an island hidden in the middle of a vast swamp. Each boat rode onto the shore and parked on dry land.

  “This is our deer camp,” Daniel announced cheerfully in his Cajun drawl as he shut off the engine.

  “Not for long, it ain’t,” said Dave.

  Dave piloted Philippe’s boat. He is short and pot-bellied, sports long hair, and is usually good-humored.

  “They takin’ it. They takin’ all of it from us.” He spat on the ground in disgust.

  The story I gradually got from the usually laconic Dave was that his family had been part of a group that leased the land for hunting going back a century. They hunted alligators and the unique local subspecies of whitetail deer known as blue deer, for the unusual tint of their coat in just the right light. Whoever owned the land on paper had sold it to a federal agency — Dave wasn’t sure which and didn’t much care — about a year ago.

  The group had been told to leave, but none of the guys was inclined to obey. I looked around at the inside of the cabin and saw an array of bunks, like in an army barracks.

  “We ain’t going,” declared Dave. “They gonna have to drag me outta here.”

  These hunters are armed to the teeth, know the swamp like the back of their hands, and have been there forever. Woe unto to the government employee who finds this place and decides it’s a good idea to try to kick them out. Forcibly removing Cajuns from this place would end about as well as Andrew Jackson’s crusade against the Seminoles. A lot of fighting and a lot of tears for no good end.

  Everybody had a beer except for yours truly, as I was hoping to pull the trigger on a nutria ASAP. For me, it was time to get back on the boats and cruise the swamp, and that’s what we did.

  Suddenly I became aware of a lot of shouting and gesticulating from one of the other boats. Daniel pointed to a moving brown mass in the water about fifty yards away. A nutria!

  I grabbed my .22 rifle (still missing the scope after the previous night) from under the bungee cord that secured it to the deck. I stood up, clicked a loaded magazine into place, and steadied myself as well as I could in a boat that was still moving, although slowly now.

  My first shot splashed into the water well behind the nutria. I popped off another and missed again. The third shot struck true and the rodent sank. We pushed in closer to where it had gone down. Philippe’s boat arrived first. He leaned over the side, reached underwater, and lifted out a dead nutria.

  Huh. I guess sometimes they float and sometimes they sink.

  I knocked out another one ten minutes later. I took real satisfaction in lifting the floating carcass by the tail and holding a nutria for the first time, after a long week of hunting them unsuccessfully. The sense of relief was incredible.

  Our little squadron set a course for a place called the Dead Zone, where we stopped to break out the beer and dress out the nutria. The Dead Zone is a large open area of shallow water with almost no cypresses or other trees. It covers a few hundred acres and takes its name from the fact that in the height of summer, the water level lowers enough to expose dry land where nothing lives except cottonmouths and the occasional blue deer.

  I examined the nutria. Although it was obviously a rodent, it reminded me more of a big rabbit than of the giant rat I’d expected. It was no less appetizing than any other dead thing I’ve turned into food.

  Philippe and Dave each demonstrated their technique for skinning a nutria. Dave’s method was tailored more for getting an intact hide, while Philippe’s method resulted in more cleanly butchered meat. Philippe insisted that the only parts of the animal worth butchering and keeping were the hindquarters, which form a cut referred to as a saddle. We put the saddles and a hide on ice in the beer cooler and made it back to the boat landing minutes before a thunderstorm hit.

  Philippe announced that we’d be taking the saddles back to Fred’s to cook them. David Roshto was firmly opposed to this. He didn’t want a bunch of swamp rats carried into his kitchen. With the easy authority of a celebrated French chef who is accustomed to determining what’s what in the kitchen, Philippe assured his old friend that he’d be cooking them there all the same.

  “Well, you just take them in through the back door, then. Don’t let nobody see you.”

  Fair enough. We brought in the “swamp rats” through the back door. The staff (Philippe doesn’t actually work at Fred’s) graciously made room for us on this busy night.

  Dressing the saddle wasn’t much different from trimming any other meat. The membrane over the muscle is carved away along with any fat (there isn’t much on the typical nutria). What was left looked like a perfectly appetizing piece of meat. The color of the smaller nutria was a pale pink. The larger one was a deeper red. Nutria at this stage of the process can be a substitute in most recipes calling for chicken.

  Working with the ingredients on hand, Philippe poured Italian salad dressing over both saddles on a baking sheet and then put them in the oven on low heat. As we waited, we moseyed across the parking lot to Fred’s On the River, a bar and bait shop that’s also owned and run by David Roshto (though founded by his good friend Fred Boyd). Two signs out front caught my eye. One points out the motorcycle-only parking in front; the other reads NO CLUB COLORS. I wondered if I’d be walking into the middle of a biker-gang fight.

  Inside the wood-paneled barroom is the most splendid display of local taxidermy imaginable: deer, bobcats, largemouth bass. An eight-foot, full-mount alligator stretched above the liquor bottles with mouth agape. George Strait was banging out from the juke box, bikers played pool with rednecks, and old women danced the two-step with anyone who’d join them. Instantly, I fell in love with the place.

  We drank beers at the bar until it was time to check on the nutria. When it was cooked to Philippe’s satisfaction, he carved the meat from the bone, shredded it, and seasoned it with a Cajun spice blend (heavy on the ground cayenne pepper and parsley). Then he browned it in a frying pan.

  “That doesn’t look too bad,” David commented as Philippe seasoned the meat. “Kinda like chicken. Smells good, too.”

  When it was served, over white rice, it looked like, well, normal food. And wonder of wonders, David — the same guy who balked at us carrying the stuff into his restaurant — wanted to try some.

  “Hey, Philippe, it’s good!” David said, surprise registering in his voice. He took another bite. Then another.

  “I can’t believe I’m eating
nutria.”

  I took a bite as well. Sure enough, it tasted like chicken. By now, I’d eaten a lot of things that tasted like chicken; every reptile has tasted like chicken. Nutria meat, as Philippe prepared it that night, was indistinguishable from chicken.

  We took the rest of the food to the bar and shared it with the bartender and anyone else who was interested. They all thought it was pretty good. Some of the locals had never heard of nutria, though in typical Louisiana style, none of them was afraid to try it.

  Philippe left early, but I stayed at Fred’s until closing time, two or three in the morning. By that time, half of Port Vincent had offered to take me fishing or hunting. I danced with an elderly woman who’d had both legs amputated below the knees and still managed to tire me out on her prostheses. Maybe I’ve had a better time on some other night somewhere else, but I sure can’t remember it.

  The Giant Canada Goose

  It took me two days to drive home from Louisiana. I ruefully drove past New Orleans, by then too low on funds to stop and see the city. I found a New Orleans radio station, WWOZ, that played Cajun music and jazz and kept it on the dial far away to the north, even as it finally crackled with static and gave way to an insipid pop station. I drove across Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, through the barbecue belt. When I stopped for the night in a cheap motel, I dreamed of the swamp and the sounds of frogs and cicadas and the taste of cloudy brown swamp water tinged with iodine and cut with lime juice.

  How long I had been on the road? I didn’t know. I arrived home in the early evening and found an in-box full of e-mail from reporters asking me about geese. Geese? Why geese? Nutria were all that mattered! As I read some more, I discovered that, out of the blue, I had unexpectedly won a long fight with the state of New York over the fate of giant Canada geese.

  I don’t think I could bring myself to hate or even actively dislike any species of animal — except leeches, mosquitoes, and yellow jackets. (Okay, and ticks.) I’ve never shared the suburban antipathy toward Canada geese, which suburbanites themselves have usually displaced. You’ll hear a lot of complaints about deer and raccoons, too.

  My beef is with the giant Canada goose in the eastern states, because it just doesn’t belong here. The geese sit in enormous flocks on undersized ponds and lakes year-round, fouling them with droppings. Most of them don’t migrate, and they gradually ruin the habitat for a lot of other species.

  There are either five or eight subspecies of Canada goose (Branta canadensis), depending on which biologist you ask. The widest-spread variety is now the giant Canada goose, but it wasn’t always so. The giant is a prairie native that once migrated north in warm weather and south in cold. It can weigh more than twenty pounds at maturity. It boggles the mind that the bird can get into the air at all.

  Giant Canadas were hunted and pushed out of their native range to such an extent that for a time they were thought to be extinct. In 1962, a flock was discovered on a lake in Minnesota, but wild goose populations across the United States were low throughout the 1960s.

  When biologists wanted to increase goose populations around the country, they selected the giant Canada goose as the species to run with. It’s not clear why they didn’t simply replenish and protect the species and subspecies that were indigenous to each region. Giant Canadas were bred in captivity for a few generations to increase their numbers, and then the stocking began.

  People soon noticed something funny about these stocked giant Canada geese. They didn’t fly south for the winter. They didn’t seem to fly anywhere for the winter. Sometimes, perhaps when they felt the need to do something, they’d gather into important-looking V formations that didn’t go anywhere in particular. Perhaps they’d fly a few miles down the road to the next lake. Or they’d fly in circles before landing exactly where they’d started.

  These geese had no migratory tradition. Canada geese that are born in the wild learn migratory routes and timetables from older geese, usually their parents. Born in captivity and released far from their native range, these geese had no idea where they were supposed to go. So they didn’t go anywhere.

  Some of the geese were stocked in areas that had never seen a Canada goose in the first place. A lot of geese found themselves in places where human habitation had transformed the ecosystem and removed most of the natural predators. Bald eagles were once their major predators, but their numbers and range had been reduced to a fraction of what they’d been, through a combination of DDT, loss of nesting habitat, hunting, and lead poisoning.

  As it happens, in most of North America, Canada geese don’t have to migrate anyway. There’s plenty of food where they are, year-round.

  Geese are herbivorous, but inefficient at it. For their mass, grasses and aquatic plants have relatively little available energy. Most dedicated grass-eaters have an enormous digestive system that is designed to wring as much energy as possible out of every mouthful. You might think of a cow as a huge digestive system, its limbs and large body there to support a rumen, a stomach, and many meters of intestine. Slice open a deer and you’ll see that the mass of a full rumen constitutes most of the torso. It takes a long, slow digestive system to extract much energy from a meal of grass.

  Unlike cattle and deer, the giant Canada goose must be able to get off the ground. Because of this, its digestive process can’t be so elaborate as to prevent it from flying. Over time, it has evolved to solve this problem: Unlike most other grass-eaters, it pushes plant matter through its digestive system as quickly as possible in order to make room for more. Its digestive system may be inefficient, but the giant Canada makes up for it in volume.

  Like most other birds, Canada geese often excrete when they take flight, in order to reduce weight. The speed with which geese need to digest their food, and their inefficiency at doing this (relative to other grass-eaters) is why goose poop is usually green: The goose’s digestive system is so rudimentary that there’s still plenty of chlorophyll in there. Pound for pound, a goose must eat more plants to support itself than does any documented terrestrial mammal. When you park a flock of these birds unnaturally on the shore of a pond year-round, the detrimental effect on the ecosystem is severe.

  To compound the problem, because so many natural predators have disappeared, the survival rate among goslings is much higher than what can be sustained without an impact on the local environment. Three hundred years ago, a pair of geese were probably lucky to have one or two survivors among their young each year, to follow them on their migration. Today it’s not uncommon for half a dozen goslings to mature out of a clutch of suburban resident geese.

  Thus, instead of a pond surrounded by forest, hosting a pair of geese that show up every year, stay awhile to raise a few goslings, then migrate, now that pond ecosystem (surrounded by grass and urbanization) must endure the presence of dozens of adult geese year-round — geese that eat the vegetation and poop it into the water, causing bacterial blooms and algal explosions.

  Don’t get me wrong; I’m delighted that the giant Canada goose dodged a bullet and hasn’t gone extinct. But enough is enough. There are too many of them in places where they don’t belong. And, just as with other invasive species wreaking havoc, this situation was caused by humans. As a human being myself, I see it as our collective responsibility to fix what we broke.

  One remedy is to eat the invaders. Geese could easily be a delectable food source; each one contains from three to fifteen pounds of meat. Giant Canada geese are plentiful and ubiquitous. Somehow, though, people have trouble seeing them as food.

  I had hunted and cooked Canada geese before, and knew they make for good eating. Then, one summer, I read an article in the New York Times explaining that the resident geese of Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, would be rounded up, gassed, and deposited in a landfill. I was furious. Killing any animal is a serious thing, and the wasteful killing of anything is reprehensible. Using something as food at least gives meaning to its death.

  The cull of Prospect Park’s geese didn
’t come out of the blue. On January 15, 2009, a US Airways passenger jet hit a flock of geese and several birds were sucked into the engines, causing total engine failure. Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger landed the plane on the Hudson River, saving the lives of all one hundred and fifty-five souls on board. It was called “the miracle on the Hudson,” and rightfully recognized as a testament to good leadership and the human spirit.

  While the rest of the United States was celebrating Captain Sullenberger, the Federal Aviation Administration started examining the goose situation that had caused not only the failure of Sully’s engines but also several other accidents. Although isotope analysis was not able to determine conclusively whether the geese were migratory or resident, the FAA decided it was time to act.

  It pushed for a cull of hundreds of thousands of geese in New York, especially around airports. Although other bird species result in a greater overall percentage of bird strikes, Canada geese are so big that they’re considered more destructive to an engine in midflight. The FAA partnered with the USDA to study the possibility of reducing the numbers of geese on the ground near airports. The USDA began work on behalf of New York City–area airports by rounding up the geese of Prospect Park in an unannounced raid.

  Throwing perfectly good goose meat into a landfill rubbed me the wrong way, so I decided to do something about it. I e-mailed my contacts at Slow Food NYC, for whom I had recently conducted a series of events, with an offer to put on a “Slow Geese” workshop, in which I would speak about the issue of geese while cooking and serving wild goose. If the state of New York did not believe that wild Canada goose was edible, then I would prove it by offering a plate to anyone who cared to try it.