Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species Read Free Page A

all of the eggs and hatchlings before they could grow large enough to be safe from most predation. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that if this keeps up, the species will disappear from the island.
    Other species are in danger as well. George told me he once witnessed a nest of baby scrub jays (an endangered species) being cleaned out by an iguana. By the time he returned to the nest with a pellet rifle, it was too late. It isn’t known how many species of bird are at risk to spiny-tail predation; the research simply hasn’t been done. Given that this lizard is equally comfortable in treetops and in underground tunnels, a wide variety of bird species could be in grave danger of extinction.
    On our second day of cruising the streets and culs-de-sac of Boca Grande, it was my turn to shoot. In Florida, no special license is required to hunt animals that are designated as nuisance species, and the air rifles we were using are exempt from the prohibitions on discharging a firearm in town. At first, it seemed absurd to refer to cruising around in a golf cart as hunting. But after having shot iguanas with George, I can honestly say that this qualified. There’s a knack to it. Understanding what type of environmental “structure” (types of plants and proximity to hiding places, for example) the lizards prefer is most of the challenge.
    Positively identifying one is a challenge; after a while, everything started to look like an iguana: shadows, sticks, even figments of my imagination. George’s trick is to stop looking for an iguana. Instead, he looks for something that doesn’t belong: a shape or a shadow that doesn’t quite fit with patterns in the landscape. Sometimes that shape is a chunk of palm-tree bark on the ground; at other times it’s the broken end of a branch protruding from one of the banyan trees that have turned several streets on the island into haunting, leafy caves. And every now and then, it just might be a big invasive lizard.
    These days, it’s less likely that the out-of-place shadow will prove to be a spiny-tail. That’s because George has single-handedly killed more than sixteen thousand of the lizards on Gasparilla. Some lucky town employee was assigned to count the fruits of George’s bounty from a ripe-smelling trash can at the end of every day. By the time I arrived, the once-booming population had been reduced to a relatively few adults and a great many of the diminutive green juveniles: enough to bring back the problem in a big way in just a few years, if the hunting pressure lets up.
    We cruised around looking for my first kill. It was early in the day and the action was slow. Iguanas don’t seem to be out and about reliably until between noon and 1 p.m. A pickup truck passed us heading the other way and George glared at it.
    “USDA guys,” George said, furrowing the brow of his shaved head. “Those guys have no frickin’ clue what they’re doing. Nothing but a pain in my ass. Guess how many lizards they take, on average, each day they’re out there.”
    He shifted his bulk in the seat to stare at them.
    “Seven.” He answered his own question, disgusted.
    “And how many were you taking right before the town put them in charge?” I asked.
    “Around thirty.”
    I couldn’t imagine what the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be doing in a small town on an island fueled by the businesses of tourism and tarpon fishing, with nary a farm or ranch in sight.
    What happened was this: After George had just about pounded the spiny-tails into submission, the USDA decided it wanted in on the action. During the last few decades, the agency has managed to expand the scope of its funding and efforts against invasive species beyond farms and into suburban neighborhoods, state parks, and pretty much anywhere else it can find them. In theory, this should be a good thing. In the case of Gasparilla Island, what it meant was that the guy who had proved that he was able to dramatically reduce