I have tasted Chinese mystery snails cooked side-by-side with Burgundy snails in otherwise identical recipes, as an experiment with chef Brian Helleberg at his Charlottesville, Virginia, restaurant, Fleurie (which specializes in traditional French cuisine). Brian was not impressed with the Chinese snails because their texture simply does not compare well to the silky smoothness of well-handled Burgundy snails. I agree with him that real French snails are much better — in French cuisine. The Chinese snails are not going to be a viable substitute for the only snails we are accustomed to eating. Their flavor is similar (rather bland, tasting mostly like whatever they are cooked with).
However, I think that Chinese mystery snails are a lot like some other mollusks that we’re all used to eating. They remind me a lot of slightly rubbery New England–style fried clams or of fake scallops. These snails aren’t going to be four-star cuisine, but after being tenderized, fried, and served with tartar sauce, they’re quite good.
When spring rolled around, nothing had happened. I had no report from the DGIF and no authorization from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to kill the snails there. I e-mailed the aquatic biologist; no reply.
In early August, I spoke on the phone with a game warden and had what seemed like a good discussion about the situation. He thought the aquatic biologist had retired, and said he’d have someone else call me back. I never heard from anyone. It is disheartening, but I try to bear in mind that nobody has given any of these people a budget or a mandate to deal with this problem. Individually, they’re all doing their best, I’m sure. They have their own universes of routines and problems to deal with. The idea that we all need to start paying attention to some snail is probably the last thing they want to think about.
To date, nothing official has happened as a result of my reporting this infestation. I heard from Monticello employees that someone had been keen on donating an aquarium full of fish and snails but had been turned down. The pond is right off the road and is an easy offloading point for anyone looking to dump an aquarium. The really big question is, What, exactly, had that tank contained? A stream drains that pond into the larger watershed. As I write, I have little doubt that invasive snails are working their way into that watershed and toward the Chesapeake Bay.
Less than a week after my fruitless conversation with the game warden, I was fishing in a reservoir near the James River. I was alone, a fishing rod in my right hand and a five-gallon bucket in my left hand, walking down the dam’s spillway, and happened to look down into a pool of running water. Sadly, what I saw were those familiar spiral, three-inch-long shells. Chinese mystery snails.
I carefully set the fishing rod on the smooth gray rocks. I rolled up my jeans, stepped into the frigid water, and began picking up snails, dropping them into my bucket one by one.
Afterword
The Ones That Got Away
Throughout the course of working on this book, there were a lot of hunts that didn’t pan out. Some of what I’d expected to be the easiest species to bag turned out to be the most difficult.
I thought pigeons and starlings would be a breeze; both species are rampant in just about every city in America. As I discovered, though, ubiquitous doesn’t mean “easy to hunt.” In every metropolis this side of the Khyber Pass, it’s frowned upon to discharge firearms within city limits. I can’t disagree with this view, but it definitely makes hunting awkward. If I could have used a pellet gun, I’d have been successful.
The first invasive species I hunted was starlings. When you look into the American sky and see a flock of tens of thousands of birds, moving together in an undulating mass like a single life-form, those are starlings. There are more of them in North America than any other bird since the heyday of the passenger pigeon.
These starlings came here in the early 1890s, the result of several introductions orchestrated by a New York City organization called the American Acclimatization Society. Eugene Schieffelin, a pharmacist by trade, for several years was president of the group. It’s said that Schieffelin’s goal was to introduce into New York City every species of bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.
I really want to believe this story because it’s romantic, but I haven’t been able to find a primary source confirming it. Regardless of motive, it’s a matter of record that the AAS brought the beloved English starling (along with many other bird species) to New York City.
The starling has some advantages over many native American songbirds. First, it’s not picky about its diet and is quite content to eat insects, seeds, and anything else well-meaning people offer. Second, it thrives in a variety of habitats. Third, it’s a good fighter. As a cavity nester — unlike, say, the robin, which nests on tree branches — it requires a hollow cavity in which to build its nest. Although it has competition for this scarce commodity in the native purple martins, bluebirds, and yellow-bellied sapsuckers, a starling is usually victorious in battle.
Equally important is the bird’s prolific production of eggs. Most native songbirds produce one clutch of young per year; a starling will bring off clutch after clutch of eggs. Whereas a bluebird raises three or four young in a year, a starling may raise eight to ten. Over time, this gives starlings a huge advantage in scrambling among species for nesting sites, diminishing habitat, and food.
Seeing how the black, iridescent birds with back-swept wings congregate in massive flocks, I decided to hunt them on my rural property in central Virginia. The challenge was the sheer size of their flock; starlings by the thousands would pass high over my land. Any sort of wing-shooting with a shotgun amounts to picking out a target and “leading” it — that is, swinging ahead of it and squeezing the trigger before the bird arrives, as it takes time for the lead shot to travel to a particular spot in midair. I’d had plenty of practice with mourning doves and Canada geese, so I thought I knew what I was doing. The staggering number of starlings, however, made that tactic moot.
There were so many birds that I couldn’t keep track of one long enough to lead it and squeeze off a shot. I would begin well enough, then not be sure which bird I was looking at, then think of shooting anyhow (forgetting that a flock consists not just of birds but of space between them as well). By the time I decided to shoot, that mass of birds was out of range.
Later, in contemplating what had happened, I came to understand a significant advantage afforded to any creature that’s part of a flock, a school, or a herd. A major challenge of hunting animals living in such a group is not a matter of speed or cunning: It’s being able to select one prey and keep track of it.
I heard an account of a leopard in Africa that entered a barn and sauntered past pens filled with immobile goats in order to take one particular animal, farther back and not as convenient. The leopard went out of its way in pursuit of this one.
Likewise, there are many videos of lions and cheetahs passing slower animals because they were fixated, for some reason, on one animal. They do this because they must. If a hunter switches suddenly to another target because it’s slower, it follows that he’ll switch to one that’s even slower, then another, until suddenly the entire herd is gone and the hunter is left with nothing. One of the most important skills of a subsistence hunter is to pick a target and let everything else fall away.
I spent dozens of hours in the middle of the field in front of my house, trying to swing on to a high and fast starling, failing, left with nothing and without having pulled the trigger. Often a neighbor pulled up in front of his house, got out of his car, looked over at me, and shook his head.
It was as if the starlings were taunting me. I saw hundreds of them in Charlottesville, Virginia, a short drive from my home. I’d watch them, at times no more than a dozen feet away, but I was legally forbidden to shoot them. I still feel itchy and restless when I see a starling close by.
Pigeons were a similar conundrum. Ubiquitous and even more urban than starlings, the rock dove hails from Europe (where, like in many other places around the world, it’s raised for
food) and was brought to North America during early colonial times.
Although you’ll see pigeons scavenging on farms and anywhere else large amounts of grain are stored, most people associate them with cities. I tried hunting them in both situations, but the ideal place for a pigeon hunt for me was New York City. The idea of hunting and eating Big Apple pigeons was tempting; the species is so common there that I thought it would be a cinch to get some.
With a speaking engagement in the city approaching, I decided to build a pigeon trap that I could place on a friend’s rooftop. The design constraint was that I had to be able to fit it into a piece of airline-approved luggage. To accommodate this, I would build a box-type trap that could be broken down into six hinged panels that would fit into my suitcase.
I stood in the aisle of the hardware store, rubbing my chin, and staring at various pieces of brass hardware. An employee approached to ask what I was looking for and whether I needed assistance.
“Well, I’m building a trap. A box-type thing. It needs to break down and fit in my suitcase,” I explained, somewhat absentmindedly.
The red-vested employee nodded, with a look on his face that indicated anything but comprehension.
“It has to get past TSA. And go back together easily. And stay shut properly. You know, for the kill.”
The clerk disappeared, fast.
A week later I was in Manhattan with the friend on the roof of his apartment building, screwing together the panels of my pigeon trap. We baited it with bread crumbs, and all he had to do was pull the string when pigeons were in it.
In retrospect, my mistake was building a trap that caught the pigeons live rather than killing them automatically. It was unfair of me to expect a regular city-dweller to open the lid, grab a pigeon, and break its neck. My friend told me that, despite the disappearance of the crumbs, there were never any pigeons in the trap. Killing something in so personal a way is not easy to do.
Later attempts at taking urban pigeons were similarly doomed. In Charlottesville, I tried to throw my cast net over one for dinner. There were plenty of pigeons, but they were usually too high for the net (with a pellet gun, they’d have been goners). On other occasions, in a park, for example, and again with the net, there were pigeons but also small children watching. That was that. . . .
Once I organized a proper expedition on a large parcel of public land reported to harbor massive numbers of starlings and a moderate amount of pigeons. It was even planted with a grain crop. It should have been a slam-dunk. I brought along several former students from deer-hunting classes, as well as my father-in-law, Bob, my brother, a few other friends, and a producer for National Public Radio.
This substantial bunch of hunters I’d gathered spent the day sitting at the edge of a field doing absolutely nothing. It was utterly mortifying. We were doing everything right, except the birds failed to show up. One fellow, an alumnus of one of my hunting classes, said he saw a few starlings that flew away before he could get off a shot. I suspect he was just trying to make me feel better about the terrible location I’d chosen.
These two species were supposed to be my easiest targets, yet I failed in all my attempts to take them. I learned two things, though. First, sometimes there’s a reason why an invasive species is successful. If it was easy to kill, maybe it would be gone already. Second, it’s usually the rules and restrictions imposed by humans that enable an invasive species to thrive.
These local failures are painful to confess, considering I went to such great lengths to collect invasive lionfish and nutria. Many times I could have grabbed a pigeon out of the air beside a subway entrance in Manhattan or Paris. Just as often, though, I probably would’ve been mobbed by incensed locals calling for the police (or the gendarmes).
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© 2012 by Jackson Landers
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Landers, Jackson. Eating aliens / by Jackson Landers.
p. cm. 1. Hunting—Anecdotes. 2. Hunting stories.
I. Title.SK33.L327 2012639’.1—dc23
2012017449
Table of Contents
Storey
Foreword
Introduction
Black Spiny-Tailed Iguanas
Green Iguanas
Pigs and Armadillos
Lionfish
European Green Crabs
Asian Carp
Nutria
The Giant Canada Goose
Tilapia, Plecos, and Armored Catfish
Snakeheads
From Aoudad to Zebra in the Texas Hill Country
Chinese Mystery Snails
Afterword: The Ones That Got Away
Copyright
Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Page 19
