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

ruins the hide, so I decided to try a different method. With a pocketknife, I skinned each limb by making a short incision from the cut end. Then I stuck the gut hook of my hunting knife into that incision and pulled it down to the reptile’s foot. This gave me access to the length of the inside, and I had two sides of hide to pull apart. This worked all right on the limbs, but the tail was a real piece of work; that hide was very tightly attached to the flesh and just wouldn’t come off. I had to continually work the blade along every bit of hide.
    Because the meat is all in the tail and legs, gutting is unnecessary. This means that an iguana is actually easier to butcher than poultry is. Iguana is much easier to process than fish is, too; there are far fewer bones. I carved the raw flesh from the bones with a small knife, minced it on a cutting board (for lack of a meat grinder in my bare-bones kitchen), and sautéed it in olive oil with a little garlic. I whipped up a basic American-style ragout sauce using the iguana meat as a substitute for the more common beef or pork.
    Like its spiny-tailed cousin, green iguana turns out to taste pretty much like chicken. Late that night, Bob and I finished our plates of spaghetti and iguana sauce and walked the dozen or so yards to the ocean with our fishing rods and some beer. The wind blew in from a tropical storm that was brewing a few hundred miles out. I cast my line into the moonlit water and wondered what would happen if even a fraction of the recreational fishermen in Florida took up iguana hunting as a pastime.
    It’s not an easy state in which to hunt: The same swampy tangle of vegetation that hid those last Seminoles won’t give up invasive green iguanas any more readily. With a few more hunters, though, we might be able to at least hold them at bay, to provide a few places for plants like the nicker nut to grow and for species like the Miami blue butterfly to continue to exist. If Floridians could learn to eat the iguanas in their own backyards, it would make a very real difference.

Pigs and Armadillos

    Human beings have left a trail of swine around the world. European explorers and colonists took pigs with them pretty much everywhere they went. Being particularly clever animals, pigs have the habit of escaping from captivity. As highly adaptable omnivores, they can survive and reproduce just about anywhere, making them one of the most widespread invasive species in the world.
    Their release was often deliberate, on islands in particular. When Captain James Cook set out on his first voyage of exploration, he brought a large supply of pigs and goats to release on suitable islands, in order to provide a source of food for future stops by naval vessels. To trace his route around the world is to follow a series of ecological tragedies that continue to unfold as the descendants of Cook’s livestock eat their way through native habitats.
    When I got it into my head to hunt pigs, I started on Back Bay, which amounts to a barrier island connected to the mainland of Virginia by a narrow spit of land. The pigs of Back Bay are the descendants of escaped domestic swine. Although no one knows how long the pigs have been on the island, they’re thought to have escaped about a hundred years ago.
    With Bob, my father-in-law, again along for the ride, I drove to a campground a few miles from the Back Bay Wildlife Refuge. We took a cabin for the night or, rather, for a very small fraction thereof. There are a lot of rules about hunting Back Bay, and one of them is that everyone needs to be at the gate to sign in by four in the morning.
    More rules: Shotguns only. No rifles, no muzzleloaders, no pistols, no bait. No spotlighting. No hunting outside of your assigned zone, on pain of arrest. The borders between zones won’t be visible, so you’ll just have to avoid moving around too much. No scouting, except in designated areas on special days. No gutting or quartering your pigs,