Feral Cities (4 page)

It's a trick he learned on the job. “There was an old lady who did not realize I was there. She came out with the corn and goes
kik-kik-kik, kik-kik-kik
and starts throwing the corn. The chickens hear it and they start flocking. So I thought I will do that since maybe they will think that it's feeding time and, sure enough, even if they don't run to us, they stand up and move around just to see what's going on.”

He leans out of the window.
Kik-kik-kik, kik-kik-kik.
Warily, the chickens roaming the street stir. We get out of the truck. Soon there are about half a dozen chickens on the street, where the rest of the team are already waiting, armed with the Miami chicken catcher's tool of choice: large green fishing nets.

We eye the chickens. They eye us back.

“We've got a little competition going on where we see who catches the most,” says Garry as he gets out his own net. Jill's the scorekeeper. At the moment, Vernon, a neighborhood service worker with shoulder-length dreads, is the reigning champ with fifteen catches to his name.

Then, suddenly, one of the roosters across the road lets out a shrill cry and the chickens start heading for cover. “They're sending a warning,” says Jill. The team members fly into action. Vernon closes in on one, net held aloft ready to strike. The bird veers left and dives through a small gap in a wooden fence. “Aw! He's gone,” says Vernon in frustration.

The other chickens have followed the rooster's lead, moving off the street and into gardens and behind fences. Calls and clucks ring out as if the birds are well aware that the city employees cannot enter private property uninvited to remove them. Defeated again, we return to the truck and head to the next location.

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 tiny 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.