Eating aliens : one man's adventures hunting invasive animal species

240 Pages·2012·5.3 MB·English

by  Jackson Landers

“Grab your shotgun and your frying pan, and let Eating Aliens
be your guide to becoming the ultimate invasivore!”
— Matthew Weingarten, chef and author of
Preserving Wild Foods
“Eating Aliens shows how eating our way out of the invasive
species issue can be a delicious challenge well worth the
undertaking.”
— Sarah Swenty, Managing Editor, Cooking Wild
magazine
“Let Jackson Landers teach you how to eat in a fun, exotic,
delicious, and nutritious way that can also help restore the
environment!”
— Chef Bun Lai, Miya’s Sushi
“Along with overhunting and habitat destruction, introduced
species are one of the mindless horsemen of the environmental
apocalypse. Landers uses the tools of the hunter to battle the
scourge of invaders — from giant Canada geese to swamp rats,
or nutria — across the country.”
— Joe Roman, Editor ‘n’ Chef of the website Eat
the Invaders and author of Listed: Dispatches from
America’s Endangered Species Act

EATING ALIENS

EATI N G
ALI E N S
One Man’s Adventures
Hunting Invasive Animal Species
Jackson Landers
FOREWORD BY HANK SHAW
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TAVIS COBURN
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Storey Publishing
The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by
publishing practical information that encourages
personal independence in harmony with the environment.
Edited by Carleen Madigan
Art direction and book design by Alethea Morrison
Illustrations by © Tavis Coburn
© 2012 by Jackson Landers
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief
passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits;
nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical,
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publisher.
The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our
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liability in connection with the use of this information.
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At Storey Publishing, we’re committed to producing books in an earth-
friendly manner and to helping our customers make greener choices. This
book is printed on FSC-certified cover stock and SFI-certified text stock.
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 2012
639’.1—dc23
2012017449
“Nature is all very well in her place,
but she must not be allowed to make
things untidy.”
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Contents
Foreword, x
Introduction, 1
Black Spiny-Tailed
Iguanas, 6
Green Iguanas, 22
Pigs and Armadillos, 32
Lionfish, 60
European Green Crabs, 84
Asian Carp, 94
Nutria, 116
The Giant Canada Goose, 148
Tilapia, Plecos, and Armored
Catfish, 162
Snakeheads, 180
From Aoudad to Zebra in the
Texas Hill Country, 198
Chinese Mystery Snails, 212
Afterword:
The Ones That Got Away, 220
Foreword
We humans are designed to eat a little of a lot,
not a lot of a little. For as long as we’ve been human
— which is far longer than we have been herders or
tillers of the soil — a diverse diet has been our best ally against
the slings and arrows of disease, famine, and hardship. It is our
ability to fully enjoy nature’s buffet that has made us so strong as
a species.
So why do we now choose to limit ourselves to a handful of
foods? The reasons are many, but most center on our almost com-
plete divorce from the natural world, which surrounds us whether
we can perceive it or not. In the service of those few foods we’ve
built our modern diet on — corn, wheat, beef, rice — we have
carpeted our nation with non-native species; only corn has its
origin in this hemisphere. And when those immigrants run wild
over the landscape, they become destroyers and usurpers of our
meadows, rivers, and forests.
They are a plague on an already stressed ecosystem. Wild
fennel, so highly prized in Italy, is a scourge of the countryside
where I live in Northern California. The dandelions in your yard
are the same; they too hail from Europe. Wild hogs till our hill-
sides, mangling native grasses and wildflowers. Once-migratory
Canada geese foul our parks and ponds. Strange fish empty our