Invasive Species
- Invasive Species
Click for larger view
View full resolution
[End Page 38]
We couldn't decide between killing lionfish or common starlings. Harry voted for lionfish because spearfishing them would require a trip to Florida, a place on the map contrary in every way to the subtle habituations of a pale-skinned sommelier. During this season of our steady uncoupling, Harry was trying to step out of his box, show me he didn't always have to be so rational, so easily accessible. Lola and Iris, our fourteen- and twelve-year-old respectively, whom Harry and I had certainly disappointed with a marriage they'd never attempt to recreate for themselves, voted for common starling, a tyrant of a bird. From the time our girls were toddlers, they'd not loved birds like kids should. [End Page 39]
________
When I'd pointed out a circling hawk or a hummingbird pricking a citrus blossom, they'd glare silently at my forefinger, as if the creatures were a figment of my frumpy excitement with things that defied gravity.
"Dad, how can you want to kill a fish? They're so innocent and bubbly," Iris said to Harry. We sat in the dining room, the four of us, a hyper-normative family preparing to eat carb-veggie-protein in taut silence. Harry must have recently orange-oiled the oak table because it had tinted my elbows mahogany.
"Guess I was thinking that the dumber species is the better one to take out," Harry said.
Lola picked at the swollen spackling of acne at the temples of her heart face. "What do we kill the birds with?"
Harry clumsily mimed the pull and release of a slingshot.
"It's not killing, you guys," I reminded them, though I'd been guilty of using the word myself while researching this family vacation. Come to find out, the travel industry had already coined a term—"Invasive Species Tourism"—and the need for participants in this man-eat-world war was ripe.
In Queensland, Australia, one could dart-hunt poisonous Amazonian cane toads in "rustic, air-conditioned yurts" erected on the fringes of sugarcane fields. Or in the Piedmont region of Italy, where the gray squirrel was debarking the fragile Garry oak population, trees that take hundreds of years to cultivate and flourish, travelers were invited to stay in "fully appointed chateaus in the gentle hills of Langhe." To restore balance to the Black Sea, where the sea walnut, a jellyfish-like creature, was decimating anchovy and dolphin populations, shack up in four-sleeper "Cavalli-designed" treehouses overlooking the Turkish coast. Tear down invasive kudzu while housed at a former Chantilly-laced plantation in Savannah, Georgia. Target practice on the wildbird murderers otherwise known as mongoose in Honolulu, Hawaii, and sleep on the beach in hammocks at night. Discreetly poison the feral goats devouring rooted ground plants and causing landslides on Amami Ōshima Island in Japan, then retire to huts made of pongee spun by silkworms. Each of the travel packages spoke of redemptive spiritual cleansing and the kind of flagrantly exploitable experiences that straddle the divide between gratuitous and charitable. They all promised to be "unforgettable." It seemed an overpromise at best, given that, historically, the most memorable part of our vacations was their forgettableness. [End Page 40]
________
Common starlings are successful invaders because their needs are remarkably common. They can live anywhere and eat just about anything. Unique physiology allows them to jam their beaks into the ground and then open wide. Narrow-set eyes give them binocular vision. Combined, these characteristics make them successful year-round foragers, excluding them from the perils of winter migration and leaving them to claim and hoard the best nesting spots. Poisoning, trapping, repelling, frightening, and shooting—humans have tried it all, yet the birds carry on dumbly, relentless. Much like marriage, I thought.
We pushed on. We booked our vacation to Jamaica, where common starlings were destroying the swallow-tailed hummingbird population, the island's national bird, known locally as the "doctor bird" because it lances flowers with a needle-like beak. We signed reams of paperwork agreeing to...
