Jerry in SC
Member
They give me the creeps, too many Japanese monster flicks when I was a kid. When I was in college in the early 70's a guy down the dorm hall had a big one just sitting under a lamp. I don't think I ever saw it move.
Jurassic Park in my back yard
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It must not have been hungry.......
Unleash the fury Mitch.........
Unleash the fury Mitch.........
Lotta Florida iguana hunting with air rifles videos on YouTube. Looks pretty entertaining actually. I'd pop 'em if it were my yard.
Starting to see them up here in Charlotte County now as well. I was surprised they had made it this far north.I did consider a Machete and cut his head off.
Yes, some people eat the tail. Pretty soon it is gonna be like the Keys, they are everywhere and do a lot of damage to plants and holes in the seawalls. They have no natural predators
Some business are getting started to go out and shoot them some high tec pellet rifles with scopes and tripods.
Great tailed grackles are a plague, but they are interesting birds. Around here they roost in trees planted in shopping centers by the thousands, making a huge mess and a LOT of screeching noise.
We also have invasive Eurasian "collared" doves. They have moved in and thrived, causing the white wing population to decline sharply. The Eurasians are similar to white wings except for the black "collar" on their necks. In TX you can kill Eurasian doves year round. It's difficult to do so, though since they flock with white wings. Accidentally killing a white wing out of season will get you fined.
LVSteve
Member
Watching a big male performing with his harem is quite a sight, but hard on the ears.
Right now there is a baby grackle somewhere on the ground in my yard, and I think another went AWOL in the yard over the back, judging by the racket on Thursday. Every time I step out one of the females expresses her displeasure. The baby in my yard cannot fly, so it makes me wonder if a couple of nestlings fell out of the nest. All very strange.
Eurasian Collared doves are present here, too. They bully the Mourning Doves. I have put a stop to that a couple of times.
I see no reason someone can't make money controlling them. They are doing it with the Pythons in Florida why not Iguanas? We have a specie of fish, locally called "squaw fish", they are actually a very large minnow called the Pike Minnow. The state pays people to harvest them, they were paying good money. I knew a Russian that was catching something on the order of four or more five gallon buckets of them daily, they were processed into fertilizer.
Some folks thought it was cruel but they truly serve no purpose other than competing with the native species of trout. My son caught a good sized one, brought it up to the house. It was a rainy Saturday, nothing much going on. I decided to give it everything I could to make it edible. They are full of bones, so I cut the backstrap portion out, rolled it in cornmeal and fried it in garlic butter. It had the texture of the paste we used in 1st grade, remember that peppermint smelling stuff that we all tasted to see if it was any good. It was mushy and not very good tasting. I have known some people that ground it up and made patties out of it, it ain't fishy tasting, just bland and mushy, Carp is better by far. The difference between Trout and Squawfish is like the difference between Coot and Mallard.
I had heard the term squaw fish referred to their lips, but a native friend told me that they were called that because the women would take part in a harvest during the spawning run of this specie. The made rock weirs in the rivers where they spawned, locally on the Spokane River. When the fish would make their way into the weir the women would wade into the water with a large net and walk in unison trapping the remaining fish. From what I understood they only harvested them for their roe, as they were not good eating, they had Salmon and Trout for eating. They would take the roe and put it the paunch of an elk or deer and bury it into the side of a hill, after it got nice and ripe they would dig it up and have a big Potlatch. Those weirs are still present today if you know where to look, I often wondered who would go to all that trouble although I have done it myself on a crick but these weirs are well constructed and quite large.
Some folks thought it was cruel but they truly serve no purpose other than competing with the native species of trout. My son caught a good sized one, brought it up to the house. It was a rainy Saturday, nothing much going on. I decided to give it everything I could to make it edible. They are full of bones, so I cut the backstrap portion out, rolled it in cornmeal and fried it in garlic butter. It had the texture of the paste we used in 1st grade, remember that peppermint smelling stuff that we all tasted to see if it was any good. It was mushy and not very good tasting. I have known some people that ground it up and made patties out of it, it ain't fishy tasting, just bland and mushy, Carp is better by far. The difference between Trout and Squawfish is like the difference between Coot and Mallard.
I had heard the term squaw fish referred to their lips, but a native friend told me that they were called that because the women would take part in a harvest during the spawning run of this specie. The made rock weirs in the rivers where they spawned, locally on the Spokane River. When the fish would make their way into the weir the women would wade into the water with a large net and walk in unison trapping the remaining fish. From what I understood they only harvested them for their roe, as they were not good eating, they had Salmon and Trout for eating. They would take the roe and put it the paunch of an elk or deer and bury it into the side of a hill, after it got nice and ripe they would dig it up and have a big Potlatch. Those weirs are still present today if you know where to look, I often wondered who would go to all that trouble although I have done it myself on a crick but these weirs are well constructed and quite large.
Then don’t miss!
I saw a show on TV 6 months ago about a younger husband and wife team in FL that had a business that specialized in shooting iguanas with PCP air rifles. The show was very good and showed the wife walking around golf courses, high-rise apartment complexes, and nice residential areas shooting them out of trees, off roofs, and a power pole or two, I think. They had a pickup with the company logo on the side. I missed the very beginning of the show, but apparently they had contracts with whatever municipality they were shooting in.
They did collect most of the dead bodies. Don’t know how much they were paid to do this. The wife made what looked like some really long shots. The sizes of the iguanas ranged from about a foot long to about 3 or 4 feet long.
There sure were a lot of them. Sinister-looking creatures.
There is a Youtube channel called Iguana Solutions. Tons of videos of this lady taking out iguanas like she's John Wick and they killed her dog. She takes out a lot of them. And there's always more.
OP
Yes there are small business set up to shoot them. Around $50 a piece with a discount for more. They then process them (grind them up) and sell as chum to fisherman But it like the Pythons, you may win the battle but not the war,
Why don’t more people shoot the alligators? There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of them. It is not good to have to share your yard or porch with alligators. They appear to be a past species.
That may be the show I saw several months ago on TV.
Gators are both native and protected.
Of course they are native, most animals are. But why are they protected?
The iguanas aren't native and neither are the pythons. And they are disrupting the ecosystem. The gators are part of the ecosystem. They are protected so that they don't all get killed. Might as well ask why the grizzly is protected. Apex predators, while occasionally lethal to humans, are a necessary part of the ecosystem.
AJ
US Veteran
What is a "past species"? They are still around, so that makes them a "present species".
Ye, got that right.
Phenix,
Maybe most animals where you come from are native, but not here. We have lots of harmful to the enviroment animals here not (not to mention plants), some came in by hitching rides in produce etc. Some were brought in to be pets, then their owners could not handle them as they got to large or escaped. We would like to see all of the non-native animals gone. The gators are were protected as their species being hunted almost to extinction. Now there are seasons to hunt them and it is controlled by a tag system. Don't you have protected species in Or.?
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