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where we had checked in. I asked one of the rangers if anyone had taken a pig. She said no. A uniformed man whom I hadn’t seen before was seated behind one of the folding tables, and he mentioned that someone had brought in a nice deer.
    Looking closer at his uniform, I saw that he wasn’t with Fish and Wildlife. He looked to be about my age, maybe a little older. I walked over to talk to him.
    “Say, are you the biologist here to take samples of the pigs when people bring them in?”
    “Yeah, when anyone has one for us. We don’t have any yet today.”
    “What do you look for when one comes in?”
    “Any kind of disease that might affect the native wildlife — brucellosis, that sort of thing.”
    “Well, if you did find a disease like that, what would you do?”
    The biologist laughed. “Well, that’s the question, all right. We’re not really sure. We have a budget to study the pigs, but it can’t be used for eradication.”
    “You’re with the USDA?”
    “That’s right.”
    “And you’re here to help figure out how to get rid of the pigs?”
    “We’re trying to.”
    “So what’s the plan, aside from the managed hunts like what’s happening today?”
    “It’s just these hunts for now.”
    “How many pigs do you figure are here right now?”
    “Probably about three hundred, just within the refuge borders.”
    “How many did you kill last year, among all of the hunters you had out here for all of the managed hunts?”
    “Fifteen.”
    “Only fifteen?”
    The USDA guy sighed and shrugged. “Yeah, I know. With pigs, we need to be knocking out at least seventy-five percent of the population each year just to keep their numbers steady. They have so many litters every year.”
    From what Bob and I had just experienced, it wasn’t hugely surprising that so few pigs had been killed. By not allowing hunters to check out the territory in advance, the people from Fish and Wildlife were just dropping people off in the dark (literally and figuratively), letting them wander around and essentially educate the pigs. Hunters never had a chance to pattern the pigs or predict where they’d be.
    The more I thought about it, the more I imagined how things could be done differently. If the USDA would stop having these big cattle calls that bring out guys like me and just find a few local hunters (as Boca Grande had done in hiring George Cera to deal with their iguana situation), it would be a much better situation. The hunters could be vetted, put through some sort of short ecology course, and given twenty-four-hour access to the property, year-round, with whatever weapons they wanted. Then there’d be hunters who’d get to know where the pigs were at any given time and they could really start killing them.
    I mentioned this idea to the USDA guy.
    “We can’t let people come in here year-round to hunt,” he said. “It would be a safety hazard for the researchers.”
    “What researchers?”
    “The people studying the effects of the pigs on the habitat.”
    When I was in college, fifteen years ago, I actually did fieldwork on the pigs of the Back Bay and gathered data on the damage the pigs were doing to the local ecosystem. I wondered what the USDA still needed to learn after fifteen years that they hadn’t already observed. The pigs were clearly a problem and needed to be hunted to keep their numbers in check.
    “We don’t have much of an eradication budget,” the USDA guy said, “but we do have a pretty good budget to study the problem. If we don’t use the research budget this year, then we won’t get it next year.”
    Essentially, people couldn’t come in to shoot the invasive species, because that would present a danger to the people who were there to study the invasive species. And they couldn’t just stop the studies, because then they wouldn’t get the money to keep, well, studying it.
    As it turned out, the guy was actually a biologist with the USDA, on loan to the state game department