Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Read Online Free PDF

and, sure enough, there was as big an iguana as I’d ever seen, lying on top of a crumbling stone wall.
    Right away I backed up and crept to the corner of the building. I dropped to one knee and steadied the air rifle for a shot of about thirty yards. Remembering what I had learned from George while hunting the spiny-tails, I lined up for a brain shot. I hoped the brain of a green iguana would be in about the same part of the head as on its carnivorous relatives.
    As the shot hit, the front of the iguana dropped to the other side of the wall while the back end remained visible. I jogged over to it and awkwardly attempted to reload the air rifle on my way.
    The back legs still gripped the stone, but the great lizard didn’t react to my presence. It seemed as dead as a reptile can get in that short amount of time, which is admittedly not very dead. Just in case, I put another shot into the head.
    It was a male, somewhere north of four feet long. There was nothing green about this green iguana. He had a magnificent reddish dewlap, and the rest of him was gray with a mottling of other colors, ending with a black-and-white-checkered tail.
    Lacking ice or refrigeration in the Florida heat, I decided to butcher the iguana immediately. This lizard was much bigger than the ones we had taken on Gasparilla Island, so rather than try to chop through its heavy bones, it made sense to take it apart the same way I’d butcher a whitetail deer.
    Figuring that the basic relationships between the major bones would be similar to those of deer, I made the first incisions on all four limbs from the abdominal side and then brought the cut up. This is much easier than trying to do it from the top down.
    The tail proved a little trickier. It was much bigger than that of the spiny-tailed iguanas we’d worked with on Gasparilla Island. I chopped at the thick, heavy tail a few ways, then, suddenly, it dropped off on its own, disconnecting right where I’d wanted it to. The disembodied tail twitched and thrashed for a moment and then lay still. I looked at the open cut and saw a smooth, W-shaped mass of muscle.
    I assumed that this reaction was the result of two things: the slow death process a lizard goes through (which hadn’t at that point reached the tail) and that, like many other species of lizard, the green iguana is capable of dropping off its tail when attacked. The predator is distracted by the thrashing tail and can even eat it as a consolation prize, and the lizard escapes to live another day and eventually grow another tail. Sometimes more than one tail grows from the stump.
    As a child reading books about natural history, I had often wondered whether the tail dropping was voluntary. Now, seeing that big green iguana release its tail when its brain was defunct and the remains were half-butchered suggested a reflex that doesn’t rely on a functioning central nervous system. I was intrigued.
    I put the limbs and tail into a plastic bag and stuffed it into my backpack. I threw the head and torso into the brush to feed the scavengers, although later I regretted not saving the entire hide to preserve as a curiosity.
    I hunted a little longer before deciding to quit while I was ahead, and called Bob to come and get me. We were going to try our hand at cooking up the iguana. I had all of the ingredients to make a pasta sauce, so I figured we’d make some iguana pasta for dinner that evening.
    Our cooking venue — the kitchenette of the pop-up camper — was quite a bit more cramped than the kitchen on Gasparilla Island where Greg Beano was showing us how to make iguana tacos. It also had limited facilities: a three-burner gas range and only the most basic utensils.
    The hide of a large green iguana is thick and strong; it would be great material for making belts, books, knife sheaths, perhaps even for backing a traditional wooden bow. Unfortunately, the easiest way to skin a lizard to get at the meat — by parboiling it — pretty much