For those of you just now joining us and looking for things to do with hunting and invasive species, I'll make it easy for you. While I have written about many different things here over the last five years, I have been very interested in hunting and eating invasive species during this past year. Here are a few of the greatest recent hits from this blog, on or close to the topic of invasive species. The order has nothing to do with relative quality. I'm just going from the most recent on back.1. Lionfish on Eleuthera, Bahamas. Lionfish are all over the Caribbean, unfortunately. I went all the way to Eleuthera to hunt them because I wanted to work with Mojo White, who is probably the most passionate lionfish hunter in the world.
2. Green Iguanas on Big Pine Key, Florida. I know, they make nice pets and are very charismatic. But right next door is Bahia Honda Key, where the Miami blue butterfly is in danger of extinction in part due to the invasive green iguanas that are eating the primary food source of the butterflies.
3. Black, spiny-tailed iguanas on Gasparilla Island, Florida. In addition to that blog entry, you can find the short TV teaser/pilot right here that was shot at the time.
4. This is something terrible that I did to some geese in order to serve them at an educational event in Brooklyn for Slow Food NYC.
5. Fergus and I keep it old-school. This is us skinning a deer with a chip of obsidian. It is a species that is non-native to the US. Warning: Gory. If that isn't DIY enough, another friend and I build the rifles that we hunt with. For a modest fee, you can too.
6. While my forthcoming book, 'Eating Aliens,' deals solely with things that have a central nervous system, I'm all in favor of eating invasive plants as well. Here's a 'Cooking With Kudzu' event that I put together for NPR last spring.
7. Shooting starlings is harder than I expected.
8. Zombies are invasive, right?
9. Sasquatch is probably indigenous. Also probably endangered. Sorry.
13 comments:
I'm not sure about Virginia, but I would suppose that it is similar to Texas in having a feral hog problem. Hogs are not native to North America and are horribly destructive to the land, but . . . they are wonderfully tasty.
The FDA impedes their exploitation by prohibiting meat processors that handle beef from also handling pork. In rural areas where I live, beef is the livelihood, so processors refuse to handle pork. In the cities, however, you can find processors catering to hunters. They will take hogs.
Tex,
We have some wild pigs in two places in Virginia. I've hunted them several times at Back Bay and one of those hunts is described in 'Eating Aliens.' I've also hunted pigs in Georgia for the book and I'm going back down for another hunt near Savannah in about a month.
The pig problem is so global that I could easily devote an entire book just to, say, following the voyage of Captain Cook around the world and hunting the descendants of the pigs that he left behind.
Hell, I ought to actually do that.
The FDA issue is interesting and I appreciate you pointing it out. I'll put some thought into what could be done about the problem.
It's not the FDA that controls how meat packing works but the USDA. I just delivered 4 sheep to our local USDA processor, they will be followed by 2 pigs and they also do beef and goats at that plant. The big issue is that the entire plant must be totally cleaned between species and many small plants will refuse to handle species X due to that requirement. Others will limit what days they do which species so that they can do all the animals of a given variety at the same time.
Also, you cannot process wild game in the same plant as domestic animals at the same time. Locally plants either process wild game or domestic animals but not both due to the issues with converting back and forth. I would assume that feral hogs are considered wild species for the purposes of processing. If you could catch them alive and bring them in then I don't think you'd have a problem processing them in any plant that does pigs. The antemortem examination is the issue with hogs shot out in the field.
Hey, what about the Nutria?
http://peripateticengineer.blogspot.com/2009/04/nutria.html
But what if people develop a taste for invasive species? Will people then farm raise them to meet the demand?
Any recipes for the asian carp that are working their way into the great lakes?
@Peripatetic Engineer,
Nutria will be in the book as well. I'm hoping to go after them in Louisiana in late February or March.
@Anonymous, I have an expedition for Asian carp lined up and ready to happen on the Illinois river but it needs to wait for spring. The fish just aren't very active in the winter. I've been working on removing a small population closer to home as well, but I just can't even find them in this weather.
After I've eaten them a few different ways I'll report back. Since they have been eating carp in Asia for thousands of years I'm going to be looking at Chinese recipes for carp first. They know what to do with them better than we do.
Jack, reading your starling post, I think you've got it all wrong. You should be hitting them over the head with cloaked spaceships, like they do in Arkansas and Sweden. Now there's some good eating.
Euell Gibbons said he learned the only way to cook and subsist on carp. Cake it in fresh cow manure and cook the whole thing in the embers of your campfire. Let it cool a bit, and break off the hard shell, revealing the soft cooked meat inside. Finally, toss the fish, which remains inedible, and eat the baked manure.
@Marc,
Euell Gibbons should have read some Chinese and Korean cookbooks instead of trying to cook them the same way as he would bass or crappie.
Here's a recipe with promise:
http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/citrus-carp/Detail.aspx
Go to Southern Illinois or Northern Missouri and ask them to teach you how to make fried carp...especially fried carp sandwiches. Trust me on this.
Hey, Gefilte fish has been traditionally been made from carp for centuries.
The store-bought stuff packed in jelly isn't particularly great (to put it politely), but the home-made stuff isn't half bad, especially if you garnish it with the traditional vinegared red horseradish and carrot on top!
Eating 'animal or plant aliens' is one place, where the term, eating them out of house and home would be most appropriate!
As for carp, it's like a lot of food. If you don't know it's carp and it's prepared well, you'd never guess it's carp.
Do check out the 'fried carp sandwich recipes', you will NOT be disappointed.
While you're at it, do check out 'smoked carp' recipes, too. Salmon would be conducting their own, Eat More Carp campaigns, if they only new they had such scrumptious competition.
If most people knew what their favorite seafood fish actually 'looked like', they'd likely not enjoy it so much. Many of them are just butt ugly!
Perception is 90% of the battle. So, Get over it!.
Locavore ... Hmm, now that's a tasty idea. ". )
It's the cleaning of carp that I have heard is so difficult -- Y-shaped ribs that make filleting nearly impossible unless it's a really big fish. I recall having smoked carp sometime years ago, which was very good. Can't wait to see your results.
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