First my apologies to the Weather Girls whose disco and dance hit “It’s raining men” I just parodied, but that revered anthem just seemed to fit so well for those of us down here in South Florida. Here we were this past week trying desperately to heat our homes against freezing weather that they are not designed to face and being forced to play favorites and choose which of our tropical plants we could save after years of careful cultivation. We were being warned of icy doom by our weather forecasters who were delirious at being able to announce climatic disaster since they were all but deprived of a hurricane season this past year. The great freeze of a century had descended upon us and suddenly we are being warned “beware of falling iguanas” Huh? Falling what? For my friends who do not live in South Florida let me tell you, we have a problem here. Nearly every plant, animal and annoying person on the planet strives to relocate itself to South Florida. We are in a constant state trying to rid ourselves of annoying exotic plants that choke out our native plants, annoying people who think they are exotic but actually are just whiners who complain incessantly about Florida while they are in Florida and then there is the iguana. We all usually overlook or excuse all but the meanest of the offending people and defend most plants but in general most of us unite in our mutual dislike of the iguana. It is our way.
How does a small green lizard become such a polarizing figure? First, they don’t stay small or green for long here in Florida where they have few competitors as they do in their native habitats. They begin to look less like a lizard and more like a dinosaur as they grow. Here a large number of them grow to as much as 6 feet in length. They range in color from green to brown to orange. They have large sharp claws for climbing and eating our plants and fruits and these claws work well at scratching if we try to capture them. They have sharp teeth that have been known to remove finger tips and leave stitch requiring bites as well. They have dug and burrowed and undermined our roads.
They are notorious for eating the blossoms of our orchids and hibiscus plants but as far as we can tell no plant is spared. My friend Rob in Fort Lauderdale was out on his hands and knees planting a border of impatiens in his yard when he looked back and saw an iguana was following him eating all the blossoms from his plants as fast as he was putting them in the ground. They eat any and all manner of fruit from berries to figs to bananas. They spare nothing.
As much as they eat, it is no comparison to the quantity they seem to poop. They are especially fond of pooping near water. As many of us have learned “near water” is defined as on our pool furniture, patios and decks and boats and boat docks. They poop everywhere and anywhere that they think will annoy us.
So when the weather man who usually screams for days in advance that a hurricane is eying us suddenly announces with the same glee “the iguanas are falling”, he has my attention. I needed to know more.
In their native countries they apparently have no need to exercise their ability to hibernate like our native reptiles do here, so they do so rather haphazardly. It never occurred to me that hibernation was a learned process. So like Cinderella at the strike of 12 on ball night, picture this. As soon as an iguana’s body temp hits 40 degrees, it just shuts down. Boom! It just goes to sleep wherever it is. At any given time the majority of them are apparently in a tree top and suddenly their claws just let go when their body hits the 40 degree mark and they faint and they fall. Thus we have “iguana drops”. Reports of iguanas going thud were all around us last week. They fell to the grass, they fell onto pool enclosures, they fell and dented automobiles and at least one reportedly hit a pedestrian. We had more reports of iguanas down than we did confirmed snow and sleet sightings in South Florida.
So I had to investigate further about this phenomenon. Hibernation as we learned in school is reversible, but they didn’t always teach us there is a caveat. In the case of these iguanas, if they stay frozen for three days or longer their chances of revival are dramatically decreased. This is good news. We all hate them but we all differ in how we “exclude” them. We all want to “repel” them which is a polite way of saying, “let’s just transfer the turd drop from my house to yours”. Not a good neighbor inducing solution. But when it comes down to it most of us just cannot actively participate in the actual killing of these nuisances. We want them dead, especially after finding a large deposit of poop on one of our Smith & Hawken poolside cushions, but still we had rather outsource the actual kill. Most of us will agree to allow them to be “culled” humanely. Humane as we have learned is very slippery to define. Even the most hardcore iguana haters among us felt bad when we saw the picture of a dead iguana with a cross-bow arrow protruding from it. But the approved humane way to kill them is to cut their heads off with one swift strike of a shovel. Oh yeah, that is a whole lot better than a cross-bow, right?
Still, I imagine by the time one has wrestled an iguana who is whipping you with his tail, snapping with his teeth while he claws you with all his might as you put him into the position for one swift shovel thrust is going to win at least half of those shovel execution attempts. Perhaps the shovel game makes the whole process more sporting but I find the prolonged freeze possibility a more palatable solution. If we are going to lose our hard worked gardens to the freeze some good just has to come from the event. Let it be the iguana culling by natural cryogenics.
Still it is inevitable, a number of us manage to screw this up. In Deerfield Beach a man supposedly began collecting the frozen iguanas from the ground in a large plastic hefty lawn bag which he threw into the back of his station wagon when it was full and as the story was reported he planned to take and dispose of them humanely. Unless someone can tell me where a drive up shovel execution squad is located in South Florida I will assume he was headed to an even more humane solution but the article did not elaborate. Still, he screwed up.
What happened next is why it is important to pay attention in science class. The bagged iguanas began to revive inside the lawn bag in the back of the station wagon and they were not happy. They began to claw their way through the plastic bag and startled the driver when one of the beasts climbed onto him as he was driving. Fortunately there was no accident. Apparently no one in South Florida is cursed enough to warrant being hit by a vehicle filled with unwanted reptiles. I don’t want to be called on to defend that assumption too strenuously. Not after the many stories we have heard about some of our citizens (especially politicians). I’m surprised it doesn’t rain toads down here yet.
Not only do we have these brainiacs trying to take iguana disposal into their hands, we had one guy in Pompano Beach who was so moved by the plight of the fallen frozen freaks of nature he actually cranked his truck up and began to thrown them into it to revive them in order to release them again into his neighborhood because he took pity on them. How special.
Meanwhile, I say we investigate doing to iguanas what the Texans used to do for unwanted rattlesnakes in Texas. Find a sponsor for an “Iguana Rodeo” and start promoting an “Iguana Cook-off”. I am betting there are some recipes out there we could use. Lets plan this quick before the population begins to re-build after this once in a century freeze opportunity.
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