Feral Cities Page 3

  The Neighborhood Enhancement Team isn’t the city’s first attempt to tackle the chicken problem. Before them came the Chicken Busters, but the program was scrapped in October 2009 as part of a drive to clear the city’s $118 million deficit. For a while the chickens were left to it. The streets were theirs. Then, in summer 2012, City Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones had a firsthand encounter with a rooster during a public meeting at Little Haiti Soccer Park.

  “The commissioner came to the meeting, and there was this rooster standing there by the glass door,” recalls Garry. “Every time she was about to say something, the rooster would just stand there and start crowing. It would not move. It was not afraid of humans—it just stood there and it was funny because whenever she started to say something, the chicken starts singing. Basically that was the day that the message was being sent.” Soon after, the city revived its chicken-catching program.

  Our third stop is Northeast Eighty-Second Terrace. Judging by the complaints list, it’s something of a chicken hotspot, with three separate complaints made in just one day. “There are chicken everywhere around, make too much noise,” reads one. It’s no exaggeration. There really are chickens everywhere, hopping in and out of garden fences, pecking at dirt, and clawing at lawns.

  Vernon, fishing net at the ready, homes in on a rooster. It flees down the sidewalk, heading between a metal fence and a large pile of twigs and leaf litter topped with a shabby cream sofa. Garry quickly closes in from the other side of the makeshift corridor.

  The bird squawks, clucking agitatedly as the two close in on it. Then it leaps into the air, flying straight over the rubbish pile and narrowly missing Jill’s head. “Waah!” she yelps, ducking. The rooster lands in a nearby garden, but its escape is quickly foiled by team member Wilfredo, who manages to shepherd the bird into the corner of the garden’s fencing before scooping it up in his net.

  Grins break out. Success at last. The captive bird is placed inside a plastic box and loaded onto the truck. Later it will be taken to a farm on the outskirts of Miami, where it will spend the rest of its life away from city streets. But it’s just one bird among many, and time is running out. Come midday, the birds will take to the shade and all hope of catching any more will be gone.

  As we head to the next location, I ask Garry why chickens are roaming the city as if it’s a free-range farm. The answer lies in Miami’s long history of immigration. “They were brought here,” he says. “I’m Haitian. The Haitians, the Spanish, the Cubans, the Puerto Ricans, we all share this one point in common with chickens—they do the fighting of the chickens, the cockfights. So they will feed them and raise them for that.

  “There’s another thing about the cultures,” he adds. “They believe that if they have a live animal, kill it, butcher it, and eat it, it’s more fresh, and sometimes they will keep the live animal in the backyard until they want to eat it and sometimes the chicken gets away. Now, they reproduce like there’s no tomorrow—a mother will lay about twelve eggs—and it goes on and on, the cycle repeats, and before you know it we have thousands running around.”

  The final ingredient in Miami’s chicken problem is religion. “In Haitian culture you have the Voodoo religion and in the Spanish the Santería religion,” says Garry. “They all use the chickens for rituals. Sometimes they don’t kill them, they will just let them loose, and people don’t touch them because they think they might be part of a ritual.” But sometimes the chickens are killed. “After one sacrifice, the head was left downtown,” recalls Jill. “I had to go get the head. Miami-Dade County collects the dogs. We collect animals when they are dead.”

  Given the role chickens have in ritual, illegal cockfighting, and food, removing them doesn’t go down well with some residents—as I soon discover. Our final stop of the day is a run-down house with a backyard full of chickens and wiry kittens. We head in to see if there’s a way the birds can be flushed out of the yard and into the vacant land next door where they can be caught. Moments later, a Haitian man in grubby clothes appears. He is visibly angry.

  “YOU THERE! GET OFF MY PROPERTY!” he yells. “YOU COME HERE! I DON’T WANT YOU ON THE PROPERTY!”

  Garry tries to calm things down by introducing himself, but the man’s not having any of it. “YOU WANT TO BE MAD WITH ME? I’LL BE MAD WITH YOU!” he shouts, before turning on Vernon. “I SEEN YOU, I SEEN YOU A WHILE BACK. YOU CUSSED ME!”

  “I ain’t cussed nobody,” replies Vernon, who really doesn’t seem the cussing type. “I DON’T CARE!” grunts the man.

  Garry tries again. “We’re here to serve. We’ve got a job to do for the city—you’re a citizen—and we’re going to get them,” he explains, gesturing at the chickens digging up the yard. “The chickens, they get into the bush, they ransack the place. That’s why we’re here.”

  “THEY DON’T DO THAT!” snaps the man as a rooster claws at the dirty soil behind him.

  “OK, they don’t do that to you. All right. Sir, you take care,” says Garry, winding up the conversation. We head back to the truck, stepping over roaming kittens while the man watches to make sure we move on. “They pulled that same move last time,” says Vernon. “They’re not the owners.”

  Does that happen a lot? I ask. “Oh yeah,” says Garry. “We’ve gone out to areas and gentlemen will come out and say, ‘What is it that you’re doing? Don’t touch my pets.’”

  But times are changing. Little Haiti is gentrifying, and a divide has opened up among residents over the chickens. “There was no tendency of reporting your neighbor for having chicken in the backyard, because it was a normal thing,” says Garry. “Now it is an issue, because people are really in tune with taking care of their homes, making them look beautiful, but with chickens running around that’s not going to happen, because whatever you plant, once they get in, within minutes you have mayhem.”

  I ask Garry if he thinks the team is winning the battle against the chickens. “I would more or less say that we win, because we have chickens to last us our careers,” he says with a smile. “At least until the public themselves come to a consensus of we don’t want this. But right now you have a portion who are feeding them, nurturing them, raising them, thinking that they are pets. You have some who don’t care until it becomes a nuisance, and others who think that we’re crazy because we are messing with the chickens. So right now we’re just keeping people quiet by addressing those chickens that make a lot of noise.”

  “In other words,” Jill interjects, “we’re putting a Band-Aid on the wound.”

  Miami may have a love-hate relationship with its urban poultry, but there’s another religious import that is proving a universally unwelcome addition to the city’s fauna: the giant African land snail. They might be slow but they are the stuff of nightmares. Fully grown, these gastropods measure eight inches long and boast an insatiable appetite for calcium that means they will happily eat the stucco walls and plaster of your home.

  Giant house-eating snails would be bad enough but, explains Mark Fagan of the Florida Department of Agriculture, it gets worse. “By the time they are six months old, they start laying a hundred eggs a month,” he tells me. They are also hermaphrodites—both male and female at the same time—and capable of impregnating themselves if the mood takes them.

  OK, so they are giant hermaphrodite house-eating snails that breed fast. No, says Mark, it’s worse than that. “It’s also a human and animal health threat. We have confirmation from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta of the presence of Angiostrongylus cantonensis in them. That’s rat lungworm disease.”

  I don’t know what rat lungworm disease is, but it sounds terrifying. It doesn’t take long for Mark to enlighten me. “It’s found in the feces of rats. The snail will consume the feces, and in it is a tiny parasitic nematode that begins its life in the snail, eventually emerging as an adult in the slime of the snail. That’s why we tell people do not pick up snails with your bare hands—always use some kind of plastic or latex glove because that t
iny little nematode, you are not going to see it. And what do we all do in Florida on hot humid days like today? We wipe the sweat from around our eyes and our mouth. Do that and you’ve just introduced the worm into your body.”

  I ask what happens next, but I don’t think I want to know. “That worm will make its way to the bloodstream, eventually making its way up to the meninges, the protective membranes covering up the brain. At which point it will expire, and that could cause a rare form of meningitis known as eosinophilic meningitis.

  “There’s no cure for it,” he adds. “Some people recover on their own. Others have to be hospitalized. It all depends on your own health status. But it can also cause other neurological issues like blindness, deafness, loss of gait, inability to perform normal everyday duties. That’s why it’s such a danger.”

  So far the only confirmed victim has been a dog in Kendall. “It was a very heavily infested property, and the dog was diagnosed by the veterinarian as having eosinophilic meningitis. What we believe is the dog got curious about a snail, was sniffing it, and got a nematode in its nose.”

  So we’re dealing with giant potentially deadly hermaphrodite house-eating snails that breed fast. Nope, it gets worse. It turns out they are a threat not just to residents of Miami but also to Florida’s economy and the national security of the entire United States. “They eat five hundred different crop plants, and that includes everything we grow in the state of Florida,” says Mark. “We provide this nation’s food from October through May. When you think of Florida, you think of sandy beaches, swaying palms, and Mickey Mouse ears. You don’t think of agriculture, but agriculture is second only to tourism economically. This snail threatens Florida’s agriculture. It can doom it, put an end to it.”

  In conclusion, what Miami is facing are giant potentially deadly hermaphrodite house-eating terrorist snails that breed fast. No wonder their arrival sparked the biggest pest control operation in the history of the Florida Department of Agriculture. Miami is the front line, and if the snails escape the city and make it into the Everglades and the farmlands, they may become unstoppable.

  Mark invites me to come see the war against the snails firsthand at the latest outbreak zone. I head there with Alex Muñoz, director of Miami-Dade County Animal Services. On the way there the threat of rat lungworm plays on our minds. “I’m used to the native animals, whether it’s sharks, manatees, alligators, crocodiles, but this …” he says, lost for words.

  The latest hotspot is in Little Haiti, and as we arrive we watch a team member carrying a clear plastic bag full of snails greet a passing colleague with a fist bump. “I’m not touching that guy with the gloves,” says Alex. “He just did the Obama punch. I’m not doing that. I’m not touching that guy’s gloves after hearing about rat lungworm. I’m going to do the faraway wave.”

  The houses in the neighborhood have already been zapped with a powerful molluskicide that dehydrates the snails and boasts a kill rate of at least 85 percent. The job today is to go house to house to gather up the dead and dying gastropods.

  Omar Garcia is the man overseeing the cleanup. In the past week they’ve found a couple hundred giant African land snails in the area, he says. “We’ve just turned up, so you’ve got snails hibernating that are coming up as we agitate the ground and stuff like that. A lot at all stages: neonates, baby size to adult size.” A couple hundred is an improvement. “I remember we found over seven hundred snails on one property when I first started doing this in November 2011,” he says.

  “There’s one here, Tristan,” calls Alex, who has been rooting through the front yard of the house. “Not that it’s going to run away.”

  Omar offers me a glove so I can join the snail hunt: “One glove enough?”

  I think for a second and then my brain screams, “Rat lungworm.” “Er … I’ll go for two, actually.”

  We search through the leaf litter, pulling back bushes, finding snail after snail. We pry them off leaves, haul them out of the soil, and pick them from walls, dropping them into clear resealable plastic bags as we go. They may be the stuff of nightmares, but here—dead and dying in their rock-hard vertical brown-striped shells—it’s hard to think of them as the terrors they are.

  Miami has been here before, says Mark. “The original infestation was back in 1966 in North Miami where I grew up. A little boy brought back three snails from Hawaii, where they are pretty much endemic. He put them in his pockets, got home, put them in a terrarium and, lo and behold, a month later there’s hundreds of eggs. So grandma said let’s get rid of these eggs and tossed them out the back, not realizing what could happen.”

  Two years later the North Miami authorities discovered the snails and called in the Florida Department of Agriculture to eradicate them. It took four years and produced a haul of around eighteen thousand snails. This outbreak is far more serious. “It’s much more widespread,” says Mark. “We’ve done 137,000 in just over two years whereas they collected 18,000 in four years in the late ’60s and early ’70s.”

  The current outbreak came to light on September 8, 2011. One of the department’s fruit fly trappers was changing a trap on a house shared by two Cuban sisters on Thirty-Third Avenue in the Coral Way neighborhood. They asked if he could also help with their snail problem. “They had snails on the walls, snails in plants, snails in trees. The snails were everywhere,” says Mark.

  The giant African land snail was on a watch list of potential threats, so the fruit fly trapper grabbed a few and sent them up to the department’s resident snail expert, who confirmed that same day they were indeed giant African land snails. The following morning, the department descended on the area en masse, sending in every one of its fifty-odd South Florida inspectors to hunt for snails. In house after house, they found snails by the hundreds.

  The area became known as Core 1, a mile-radius zone around the Cuban sisters’ home. It was the ground zero of the second snail invasion of Miami. By the end of the year, fourteen outbreak zones had been found throughout the city from Little Haiti and Hialeah to Coral Gables and South Miami Heights. By the start of 2014, twenty-five cores had been discovered.

  How the snails got into Miami this time isn’t known, but the leading theory is that they were brought there for use in Santería or, most likely, Yorùbá rituals. Yorùbá is one of the traditional religions of Nigeria, the native home to the giant African land snail. The mollusk has a starring role in the faith’s creation story. The gist is that the deity Obàtálá used a snail shell filled with loose earth to transform the world from marsh to solid land. Fittingly, he used a chicken to spread the earth around the world.

  When Yorùbá believers were brought as slaves to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean, the slave masters banned them from practicing the religion and insisted they follow Catholicism instead. The result of this forced merger of Yorùbá and Catholicism was Santería. “In the practice of Santería, snails are an important part,” says Mark. “They foretell your health, spirituality, and prosperity. But there were no giant African land snails in Cuba, so the Yorùbá practitioners and the Santería practitioners used any common snail that was available. But stricter Yorùbá practitioners use giant African land snails, so there is a theory that Yorùbá practitioners may have brought these in and they got out of control.”

  There are precedents that support the theory. US Customs and Border Protection once caught a woman coming back from Nigeria at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport who had snails hidden under her dress. Another time a man stopped at LAX was found to have giant African land snails lurking in every pocket of his suit.

  In Miami itself, police launched an investigation in 2010 into a Yorùbá practitioner who had convinced his followers that the snails could cure them of their aliments. He held the creatures of over their heads and then cut them so his followers could drink the “curative” mucus. The police got involved after the snail juice drinkers began complaining of violent illness.

  It’s unlikely, however,
that the original source of the current outbreak will ever be conclusively determined. “We would certainly like to say here’s definitively how they got here, but in reality we will probably never know,” says Mark.

  Despite the large scale of the outbreak, Mark is confident the snails will be eradicated. The department’s fast reaction and a major billboard campaign urging people to “Look for it! Report it!” seems to be paying dividends. The rate at which new cores are being found has slowed dramatically, and the newest sites seem to have far fewer snails within them. In the meantime, the department is preparing to bring in its latest weapon against the snails: Labradors trained to sniff out snails hidden in the undergrowth that human eyes may miss.

  “The awareness campaign means we are getting to them sooner, before they are able to establish a huge population,” says Mark. “The idea is we need to get to the point where we are not finding any more snails, dead or alive. Then we still have to go two more years of continuing to survey before we ask for a declaration of eradication. But there’s no question that we will reach that point.”

  Miami is something of a hub for exotic animals. Its tropical monsoon climate ensures that almost anything that gets there and manages to breed will survive. “We’ve got everything,” says Alex. “You name it, we’ve got it. Just like our culture.”

  Some, like the giant African land snails, are met with a ferocious crackdown, but others become so established there’s little choice but to accept them, and this is what has happened with the iguanas. These lizards, with their outlandish Mohawk-like spines running down their backs, are a common sight in Miami. They especially like the canals. Take a trip along North Okeechobee Road and you can see dozens of them sunning themselves on the banks of the Miami Canal. “They love the canal banks,” says Alex as we drive past. “Who goes out to a canal bank? Nobody. So it gives them a green corridor to go up and down.”