Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (26 page)

Temperature changes like the one in 2010 could eventually wipe out the Chinese mystery snail in many parts of its introduced range. Indeed, many invasive species could succumb in this way, wiped out by an unusually cold winter or a blistering summer. Green iguanas, for example, are still a big problem in the Florida Keys and in parts of southern Florida, but they were once a threat as far north as Sarasota. Then, along came the winter of 2009, and its extended deep freeze decimated the more northerly population. Green iguanas don’t retreat into burrows, the way black spiny-tailed iguanas do, and thus have no protection against prolonged bouts of cold weather. For a while, they go into a state of torpor, meaning their metabolism slows dramatically. In this condition, they’re unable to move or escape predation. If the temperature rises soon enough, they’ll recover; if not, they die.

North America is subject to broad swings in temperatures; maybe the Chinese mystery snails won’t make it here in the long run. Who knows if they’ll be present in a hundred years? The trouble is that it won’t take a hundred years for them to eat many native North American species into extinction. Imagine what would happen if they destroyed all the native snails from a number of river systems and then in twenty years themselves died out during a heat spell. We’d be left with no snails at all, with the cascading effects throughout the ecosystem that would result from a buildup of aquatic detritus.

After I came upon that first population of invasive snails, I started making phone calls. First, I got in touch with the owner of the pond. That happened to be the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, the estate of our third president.

The irony hit me immediately: Thomas Jefferson was an architect, engineer, and philosopher — and a plant hunter. In his pursuit of horticulture, he experimented with growing many exotic plants here in Virginia. The most notorious locally is the tree of paradise, which is now a much-hated roadside weed. It thrives in disturbed land and is known for burrowing its roots into house foundations and for invading hay fields. A nursery owner in New York first imported the plant into the United States in the 1790s, but it was the author of the Declaration of Independence who brought it to Virginia. And now, less than a mile from Monticello, on land owned by the foundation bearing his name, another invasive species had gotten a foothold.

I met with the gentleman in charge of that section of the grounds. As we strolled around the pond, he explained how the snails appeared and became more and more numerous, eventually crunching underfoot with every step as volunteers walked around to maintain the gardens.

He was somewhat sympathetic, though unconcerned about the ecological consequences of allowing Chinese mystery snails to escape into the river that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay, claiming it wasn’t his problem. He said the foundation would be willing to allow removal of the snails if Virginia’s Department of Game and Inland Fisheries would give the matter its blessing. Fair enough.

My next step was to talk with the district biologist for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, Mike Dye. Mike had always been of great help when I needed something from his organization, and now he put me in touch with one of the department’s aquatic biologists. Through e-mail, that person asked me to bring him some samples of the snails in question. I rounded up half a dozen snails of various sizes in sample jars filled with rubbing alcohol and delivered them to his office. And then I waited.

At first I wasn’t worried; it was fall, and the snails would be going dormant for the winter. (In warm weather, they reproduce prolifically, so that’s when they must be kept in check. I discovered this when I put two of them in a small aquarium and tallied up their offspring daily for two months. Within a month, my initial pair had turned into close to forty.) Anyway, the cold months ahead lulled me into thinking we had plenty of time.

I also tried my hand at cooking Chinese mystery snails. Culturally, Westerners have some context for eating snails; most of us are familiar with the role of another species of snail (
Helix pomatia,
better known as the Burgundy snail) in French cuisine. It didn’t seem a huge stretch, then, to eat Chinese mystery snails. In fact, there have been large-scale attempts at farming them as an inexpensive substitute for the French snails.

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.