CHAPTER 10
Where Hogs Rule and Turtles Tremble
Why do people always have to take something extraordinary and make it ordinary? Human thinking and planning really doesn’t have a very good track record and human awareness is proven to be limited. Unknown things are hopeful—it’s the known that I dread.
—Elizabeth Pool and Eleanor West, The God of the Hinge
Ossabaw Island, Georgia — Codey Elrod twists a silencer onto the barrel of the AR-15, grabs an extra clip, and disappears into the live oak and saw palmetto forest. A light rain falls. Thunder thumps in the distance. Codey, eyes scanning the ground for telltale signs, espies a deer’s antler.
“That’s good luck,” he says.
Codey leaves the maritime forest and enters the marsh of mud flats, cordgrass, and black needlerush. The surf whispers in the distance. Two wood ducks, spooked, fly off. Codey speed-walks the animal trails following the pawprints of hogs, deer, raccoons, and rabbits.
“There she is,” Codey whispers, stopping and shouldering his rifle. A fifty-pound sow, full of milk, roots through the muck thirty yards away. Codey fires three, quick, muffled shots. The black-haired mama pig squeals.
“She won’t do that no more,” Codey says.
He drags her body deeper into the marsh before returning to the trail. Five minutes later Codey tops a grassy knoll and, in the time it takes to turn a page, he fires again. And again. And again, the silenced shots nonetheless ricocheting around the tree-lined marsh. In all, eight shots fired. Five more dead hogs.
“It turned out to be a pretty good afternoon, didn’t it?”
Hunting doesn’t bother me. There’s enough game in the South’s woods and wetlands without jeopardizing any species’ survival, unlike a century ago when hunters blasted Bambi into near-extinction. And one billion dollars a year in excise taxes on the sale of ammo, guns, and gear goes for land and animal conservation. What Codey hunts, too, shouldn’t unduly bother the most ardent PETA supporter. He kills feral hogs, the alien, invasive, and insatiable wild boars introduced to the Americas in the 1500s by Spanish explorers. Not only do the pigs Hoover up nuts, roots, flowers, snails, snakes, fruit, and vegetable crops—costing billions of dollars in lost revenue annually—but they also eat eggs. On Ossabaw that means the eggs of federally endangered loggerhead sea turtles that come ashore between May and September and dig nests on the state-protected island’s thirteen miles of pristine beach. Codey, in fact, is the South’s only full-time, state-paid hog hunter. He is, officially, a “hog control technician” for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
“My job,” Codey says, “is to kill hogs.”
Something he does with deadly consistency. He has killed ten thousand hogs on Ossabaw. And yet they never disappear. Sows can have two litters a year, with maybe a dozen piglets at a time. Codey plays a reallife version of whack-a-mole every day. He’s Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but with a gun.
“Taking a life is not a small matter to me,” he says, mossy oaks silhouetted against a darkening sky. “But they’re not native to this habitat. And they’re outcompeting other wildlife.”
In the pantheon of nasty Southern invasives, feral hogs rank near the top. But the dais is crowded. Every forest, waterway, and farmer’s field has its alien nemesis. In 2016, President Obama signed an executive order defining an invasive species as “a nonnative organism whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm, or harm to human, animal, or plant health.” They come from other countries or other regions of this country. Some estimates peg the number of invasive species at fifty thousand. Others say they’re the second biggest threat to endangered species after habitat loss. Climate change pushes the foreign plants, animals, and pathogens farther north as once-unwelcoming climes become more hospitable. Daniel Simberloff, a conservation biologist at the University of Tennessee, says, “This is a huge problem that’s getting worse.”
Nowhere more so than in the South, a veritable hothouse of alien awfulness. Virtually every step along Muir’s route today is home to some unwelcome import. Kentucky’s nickname is the Bluegrass State, but there’s nothing indigenous about its famed turf. It’s native to Europe, northern Asia, and the mountains of Algeria and Morocco. (And it’s not blue, either.) Carp from Asia were brought to waste-treatment plants and commercial catfish ponds in Arkansas and Mississippi in the 1970s to clean up parasites, weeds, and algae. Floods set them free and they’ve since traveled up the Mississippi (to Chicago), the Ohio, and the Tennessee Rivers and their tributaries. I recently spent a few cold days along the Tennessee talking to biologists, fishermen, river guides, and elected officials. Everybody was freaked out by the speed and rapacity with which silver and black carp had moved upriver, and beyond a handful of TVA dams. Black carp, with human-like molars, eat mussels and snails. Silver carp slurp up the plankton that all native mussels and fish depend on. Also known as “flying carp,” silvers can jump ten feet out of the water, leaving boaters and water-skiers with broken bones and insane Instagram memories.
“They’re going to keep migrating upriver, I don’t care what you do,” a marina manager at Lake Pickwick told me.
The mountains have also been ravaged by Asian imports. Four billion American chestnuts, the woody workhorse of the Appalachian forest prized by furniture makers and nut lovers, were destroyed by a pathogenic fungus from Japan in the early twentieth century. Now it’s the Fraser fir’s turn to disappear, courtesy of the woolly adelgid bug that hitched a ride from Japan to Virginia in the 1950s.
Armies of armadillos and caravans of coyotes roll across Georgia following the ever-warmer weather north. (Let’s not even mention kudzu.) Northern snakeheads—the slimy, big-toothed fish that crawl like snakes, breathe on land, and eat other fish as well as frogs and lizards—were found in a pond outside Atlanta in 2019.
The nearby port of Savannah is a convenient jumping-off point for all manner of invasives that hitch rides in ballast water or burrow into wood pallets. Redbay ambrosia beetles jumped ship in 2002 and quickly introduced a wilt-causing fungus to laurel trees around Savannah before spreading across the Atlantic coastal plain. Hundreds of millions of redbay trees from Texas to North Carolina have succumbed to the disease that’s now targeting sassafras and avocado trees, according to the National Invasive Species Information Center.
And then there’s Florida, the poster child for Nature Run Amok, where the same conditions that welcome nine hundred humans daily—warm weather, sprawling cities, early-bird buffets—attract foreign interlopers, too. The US Fish and Wildlife Service says the Sunshine State harbors more nonnative plants and animals—skunk vines, walking catfish, vervet monkeys, Muscovy ducks, bloodsucking worms, dog-sized Brazilian rodents—than any other state. One-fourth of the wildlife in Florida, and one-third of the flora, ain’t from around there. It doesn’t help that three-fourths of the nation’s imported plants come through Florida. Nor that the world’s reptile trade is headquartered in and around Miami. Time magazine called Florida “America’s soft underbelly when it comes to invasives.” The state spends a half-billion dollars a year fighting ’em. It even sponsors an Exotic Pet Amnesty Day where owners can turn in their “alien” animals, no questions asked.
Atop anybody’s list of the most Frankensteinian of Florida’s alien creatures is the Burmese python. Up to twenty feet long and wide as a telephone pole, the python wreaks havoc on the state’s ecology by swallowing any mammal that dares to cross its path. Natives of Southeast Asian jungles, the reptiles were brought to Florida as exotic pets. When they got too big—upwards of two-hundred pounds—owners dumped them in the canals and lakes west of Miami. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed reptile farms near the Everglades, allowing countless constrictors to escape. Females can lay one hundred eggs at a time. No animal is safe from the Burmese python’s maw. The US Geological Survey reports that 99 percent of Everglades raccoons and opossums have disappeared. Gone too are marsh rabbits, cottontail rabbits, and foxes. Pictures of pythons wrestling alligators or having deer-shaped bulges in their bellies underscore their power and dominance.
What’s more frightening, though, is their relentless territorial expansion and the futility of trying to stop them. They’ve been observed at both ends of the Florida Keys, a wellspring of biodiversity. The adorably cute Key deer, the almost-as-cuddly Key Largo cotton mouse, and the Lower Keys marsh rabbit—or Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, named after the Playboy founder who donated money for bunny field research—are all federally endangered and could be next on the python’s plate. Apparently not satisfied with destroying South Florida’s wildlife, the pythons spread parasitic worms that kill pygmy rattlesnakes in North Florida.
Pythons, though, have competition for the title of Florida’s grossest invasive. Cane toads, native to South and Central America, were brought to the Sunshine State in the 1930s and ’40s to eat sugarcane pests. When bitten, the toads secrete a toxic poison that can kill a dog. They usually hang out in South and Central Florida, but have recently been found near Gainesville.
And then there are the lizards. Green iguanas literally fall out of trees when it gets cold. I ran over one on US 1 in the Keys, felt horrible, and confessed my sin to a biologist who laughed and said he swerves towards the lizards. They’re pernicious buggers, burrowing beneath foundations, devouring eggs and snails, and pooping everywhere. Spiny and medieval-looking, the iguanas grow more than five feet long. They’re also strong swimmers that can hold their breath for a long time, which allows them to work their way into . . . toilets. A Roto-Rooter plumber got the surprise of his life a few years back when he pulled an iguana from a Fort Lauderdale toilet. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission encourages homeowners to shoot them on sight. Their reptilian brethren, South American tegus, will also eat small alligators and young gopher tortoises. In 2019, they were discovered in southeast Georgia. A year later they were in South Carolina.
Miami, of course, is home to one of the state’s more bizarre interlopers. Giant African land snails, once eradicated, were smuggled from East Africa a decade ago for use in religious rituals. The snail’s mucus allegedly heals certain ailments. The shelled gastropod, one of the world’s largest terrestrial mollusks, also has an insatiable appetite for any and all plants. Or stucco. Or car paint. Anything with calcium. They’re hermaphroditic love machines, with both male and female bits, capable of reproducing with anybody. Their shells can puncture tires. Oh, and they can kill you. Snail slime serves as a warm, comfy home for parasitic rat lungworm, which causes meningitis.
Another chapter could be written on alien and invasive plants, but I won’t bore you. Safe to say, the same forces that attract some of the world’s weirdest mammals lure nonnative plants to Florida, too. Fourteen hundred invasive plants call the Sunshine State home, according to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Two—the Old World climbing fern and the melaleuca tree—march in deadly synchronicity across the Everglades, smothering the island-like hammocks and marshes and the flora that sustain a host of threatened and endangered species, including wood storks and snail kites. And they’re both riding the Climate-Change Express for destinations north.
What a difference a bellyful of gingerbread makes. John Muir, after five or six days hungry, alone, and afraid in Bonaventure Cemetery, stumbled—“staggery and giddy”—into Savannah for yet another visit to the express office in hopes that his brother had wired the money. He had. Within minutes Muir had purchased “a jubilee of bread” and, a bit later, a full-fledged breakfast. His spirits soared; his mind, though, still seemed addled by his Bonaventure experience.
“Of the people of the states that I have now passed, I best like the Georgians,” Muir wrote, “even the negroes.”
The naturalist took stock of all the wonderful plants, flowers, and trees he had encountered along the way, including magnolias, tupelos, live oaks, Kentucky oaks, Spanish moss, long-leafed pines, palmettos, mimosas, bamboo, and lilies. “Yet I still press eagerly on to Florida as the special home of the tropical plants I am looking for, and I feel sure I shall not be disappointed,” he wrote.
It’s a mystery why he sailed, instead of hiked, to Florida. The hundred-mile stretch from Savannah to St. Marys, where a ferry would’ve readily carried him across the same-name river to Florida, is rich in flora with wide, plodding rivers feeding estuarine marshes. Perhaps he was scared of the jungle-like stretches of swamp and seclusion. Maybe he was tired of walking and wanted to get on with his life. Possibly he was feverish and shell-shocked from his Bonaventure stay. Muir never explains why he didn’t walk to Florida, and neither do his biographers. But what he missed—the maritime forests, the saltwater marshes, the barrier islands—has mesmerized nature lovers for centuries.
William Bartram, the Philadelphia botanist who introduced Southern biodiversity to the world, traveled not once but twice between Savannah and Florida in the 1770s, which he chronicled in Travels of William Bartram.
“It was drawing towards the close of day,” he wrote while strolling a greensward near St. Marys, “the skies serene and calm, the air temperately cool, and gentle zephyrs breathing through the fragrant pines; the prospect around enchantingly varied and beautiful; endless green savannas, chequered with coppices of fragrant shrubs, filled the air with the richest perfume. The gaily attired plants which enameled the green had begun to imbibe the pearly dew of evening; nature seemed silent, and nothing appeared to ruffle the happy moments of evening contemplation.”
The salt marsh is an otherworldly kaleidoscope of above- and below-water fecundity, which enraptured poet Sydney Lanier in The Marshes of Glynn.
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.
Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding
and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Rachel Carson, my Fish and Wildlife soulmate, wrote an ecologically and spiritually rich account of the coastal world in Under the Sea-Wind, her first book, published in 1941:
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.
Muir, though, would experience little of these coastal riches. He sailed that afternoon for Fernandina on the Sylvan Shore, a steamer that carried him down the Savannah River to the Atlantic, and past Tybee, St. Catherines, Sapelo, St. Simons, and Cumberland Islands. Muir, from a comfortable distance, observed the forests of live oak, yellow pine, cabbage palm, and magnolia, as well as the jungled understory of yaupon, wax myrtle, sparkleberry, and saw palmetto. He could’ve filled another plant press with cordgrass, yucca, glassworts, resurrection ferns, and beach-tea croton. It was peak birding season, so Muir missed the wealth of great blue herons, rufa red knots, piping plovers, American oystercatchers, and short-billed dowitchers idling along the untrammeled beaches. Instead, he seemed quite relieved to sail “past a very sickly, entangled, overflowed, and unwalkable piece of forest.”
I drive to Savannah early one February morn. Codey picks me up at the state dock a couple of miles below Bonaventure Cemetery. It’s a blue-sky day with a wisp of wind, ideal for hunting hogs and side-stepping snakes and alligators slowed, I hoped, by the cool weather. It takes twenty minutes to motor across the Little Ogeechee and Ogeechee Rivers to reach Torrey Landing. I’d visited Ossabaw before as a newspaperman to write a lengthy profile of Sandy West, the island matriarch whose father bought the island in 1924, joining a slew of Northern grandees named Carnegie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt who gobbled up Georgia’s barrier islands for winter retreats. Sandy, then 103 years old, was broke, infirm, and destined to leave the island she loved like nothing else. My story, disguised as a “life-well-lived” paean to a selfless philanthropist and environmentalist, with testimonials from Jimmy Carter, Annie Dillard, and Greg Allman, was really a fundraising plea to help Sandy remain on Ossabaw. It didn’t work.
Codey eases the scruffy, state-issued Chevy pickup down the Main Road, past Sandy’s pink stucco mansion, and over to Half Moon Road. He’s chewing a plug of Grizzly tobacco with a rifle across his lap, his head on a swivel. Anything moves, Codey sees it. He aims to hunt alongside the Bradley River, which serpentines through tidal marsh, cypress swamp, and maritime forest. I ask how he got one of the most coveted jobs any Southern boy could dream of. Codey tells me his story.
He grew up in Taylorsville, an hour northwest of Atlanta. His father was a welder; his mom worked at a bank. He started hunting and fishing with his great-grandfather, Papa J, when he was four years old. Codey earned an associate’s degree in wildlife management at a small South Georgia agricultural college. He first came to Ossabaw as an hourly hog hunter in 2010. A year later he was hired full-time and told to kill as many wild boars as possible. “I never would’ve imagined that this would be my job,” Codey says. “But I sure do enjoy doing it.”
He spends three hundred days a year on Ossabaw, usually alone, in a cabin. He had a girlfriend in Savannah, but is now “happily single.” He saves vacation days for the spring to go—what else?—turkey hunting.
Codey, twenty-nine years old, uses every hunting trick in the book to kill pigs: dried corn bait; thermal-imaging scopes; dogs Bobo (a pit bull) and Rudy (a black mouth cur); and traps. Trapping garners the highest yield, but takes a lot of time. He won’t hunt the dogs in hot weather; cool-down ponds also attract alligators. Codey prefers shooting hogs one at a time with non-lead bullets that won’t harm bald eagles and other scavengers. Danger abounds: alligators; rattlesnakes; ticks; and, of course, hogs. Once, in South Carolina, Codey was hunting with dogs when he came in for the kill with a pocketknife. Momentarily distracted, the hog gored him with his tusks. Fourteen stitches in the arm, another twelve on the wrist.
“I’ve had some dreams about hogs, more like nightmares of being attacked by hogs,” says the sandy-haired, bearded hunter. “It’s like being in your house when a burglar breaks in and all you’ve got is a pillow to hit him in the head with.”
Codey has been hunting Ossabaw since 2012. He kills, on average, 1,117 hogs a year. In 2016, he killed 1,561 hogs—an Ossabaw record.
“That’s always the goal—kill all the hogs you can,” Codey says, classic rock playing low on the truck radio. “But I might work myself right out of a job. Maybe not. There’s a problem with hogs pretty much everywhere in Georgia now.”
Not everybody considers hogs a nuisance. Christopher Columbus brought eight pigs to Cuba in 1493. Spanish conquistadores and missionaries later introduced them to Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The hogs are a renewable and nutritious resource. Tasty, too. Restaurateurs in Charleston and elsewhere swear by the taste of Ossabaw pigs due to their genetically pure makeup, fat quotient, and acorn-heavy diet.
Sandy West considered them pets. She had run through her family’s plate-glass fortune by the 1970s, spending millions on world-renowned artists’ and writers’ colonies (Ralph Ellison, Margaret Atwood, Annie Dillard), an environmental retreat for college kids, and the preservation of the forty-square-mile island’s natural splendor. Developers salivated at the prospect of building a bridge and high-end golf course community a few miles below Savannah. Aristotle Onassis and wife Jackie Kennedy offered to buy it sight unseen.
Sandy sold Ossabaw Island to the state in 1978 for eight million dollars and a so-far solid promise that it forever remain wild and undeveloped. (The deal let her live in the Spanish revival mansion until her death.) Ossabaw became Georgia’s first Heritage Preserve. To cut down on expenses and damage, the state ordered all the cows and horses off the island, angering the animal-loving Sandy. When wildlife experts said the pigs rooting up the island needed to be heavily culled, Sandy, who considered two pigs named Lucky and Mrs. Musgrove as dear friends, exploded.
“I am not going to be pushed around,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000. “I’m not going to let them destroy every bit of the power and magic we had. It would be so easy to do, the minute you put the hand of man here.”
John Muir would’ve loved Sandy. Codey likes her a lot, even though Miss Sandy can’t abide his profession. For a while, they were the only full-time residents of Ossabaw: the eccentric naturalist (she also had a diesel-sniffing Sicilian donkey named Mary Helen who’d barge into the pink mansion unannounced); and the hog killer.
“She’s a real special person,” Codey says. “If you can’t respect her decision not to sell out, I don’t know what to tell you. That says a lot about her character.”
It’s near dark and Codey cruises South End Beach Road with a half dozen kills on the day. A never-logged cypress marsh hugs one side of the road, the forest the other.
“Look at that!” Codey shouts.
I see nothing.
He shifts into park and opens the door in one motion. Out he jumps, rifle on the rise. He aims. One shot. That’s all it takes. In the middle of the marsh, seventy-five yards away, a two-hundred-pound hog with a bright pink spot on its chest thrashes before falling silent.
“He thought he was hid good enough, didn’t he?” Codey says, adrenaline flowing. “He was dead in the water. I usually get ’em.”
The 2020 International Wild Pig Conference was set for Jacksonville, Florida, in early April and I was raring to go. It was on my way, after all, even though Muir skirted the town en route to the Gulf. Sponsored by the National Wild Pig Task Force, the annual gathering of hog hunters, farmers, foresters, biologists, nonprofit conservationists, and state and federal officials promised the latest insights into pig diseases, trapping techniques, and poisoning practices. Wild boar have “arguably become one of the greatest wildlife management challenges facing natural resource professionals and landowners,” the task force website says. I needed to hear these guys. Plus, a pig pickin’ would kick things off.
Alas, the conference got corona-canceled. So I contacted the conference organizers to get some information on the feral swine menace. Anywhere from two to six million hogs, I was told, wreak havoc across forty states and four Canadian provinces. Texas appears to be the most overrun. They thrive almost anywhere: farms, fields, swamps, mountains, barrier islands, suburban golf courses. Hogs are “opportunistic omnivores” who’ll eat anything. They can root down three feet below ground. They devour fields of corn, sorghum, soybeans, rice, wheat, melons, hay. Wild pigs dig up the soil surrounding streams, causing erosion, sedimentation, and fish kills. Invasive plants fill the holes left behind by their inhalation of grasses and forbs. They’ll even eat snakes, quail, deer, lambs, and calves. The US Department of Agriculture admits that its one-and-a-half-billion-dollar tally of annual damages caused by hogs is low. Texas alone estimates four hundred million dollars in hog damage.
And that’s the death and destruction wrought by just one invasive species. What about all the damage done by other alien intruders? For that I need David Pimentel, a Cornell University professor of agricultural sciences. In 2005, he penned what’s still considered the most comprehensive assessment of the damage done by invasive species. Unfortunately, Pimentel died in 2019, at ninety-four, after a long, illustrious, and prolific—forty books—career advocating on behalf of the natural environment. It was Professor Pimentel and colleagues who calculated that fifty thousand foreign species have been introduced to the United States. Some, like corn, wheat, rice, and cattle, have proven beneficial. Other (mostly) welcome species include dogs, cats, and insects that control biological pests. Most plant and vertebrate invasives have been intentionally introduced, Pimentel said, while most invertebrates and microbes have not.
“In the past forty years, the rate and risk associated with biotic invaders have increased enormously because of human population growth, rapid movement of people, and alteration of the environment,” he wrote. “In addition, more goods and materials are being traded among nations than ever before, thereby creating opportunities for unintentional introductions.”
Pimentel pegged the damage done annually by all alien species at a staggering $120 billion. And that was fifteen years ago. Imported invasives, for example, account for nearly three-fourths of all types of weeds, and they reduce crop yields by 12 percent, or thirty-three billion dollars, a year. Nearly four hundred alien bugs cost the forest-products industry more than two billion dollars a year.
But it’s the colossal, yet incalculable, damage that invasives do to the biodiversity of the natural environment that threatens to sunder the South. The professor determined that 42 percent of all the threatened and endangered (T&E) species are “declining because of invasive species.”
But is the invasive invasion really such a bad thing? Alien species have been around ever since Gronk tottered out of the Great Rift Valley. We’ve grown accustomed to them, if we even notice them. Feral hogs, after all, were introduced to the Southeast five hundred years ago, and hunters and chefs love them. Sweet-smelling honeysuckle strangles native plants, yet studies show that the flowering ornamental boosts the abundance and diversity of birds. Domestic cats aren’t native to the United States, and kill up to four billion birds a year, but try telling your mother that cuddly Coco must go.
Mark Davis, a Macalester College ecologist, roiled the academic world in 2011 with an essay in the journal Nature entitled “Don’t Judge Species on Their Origins.” Davis and associates acknowledged that certain alien species are harmful, yet most are benign or even beneficial to their respective ecosystems. He likened discrimination against invasives to nativist wrongheadedness and a foolhardy desire to return to some naturally pure state, like the crazy notion of “wilderness.”
“The natural systems of the past are changing forever thanks to drivers such as climate change, nitrogen eutrophication, increased urbanization, and other land-use changes,” Davis wrote. “It is time for scientists, land managers, and policy-makers to ditch this preoccupation with the native–alien dichotomy.”
Codey rises before the sun to hunt Ossabaw’s south end. It’s cool and windy, with last night’s rain lingering and the tide running high. The weather, again, is ideal, unless you’re a pig. The wind swooshes everything around, discombobulating animals’ sense of smell and direction. Rain muffles footsteps. High water drives hogs up onto dunes and hammocks.
Codey puts on the night vision goggles at the edge of the Buckhead Field and scans the old cotton patch. Nothing moves. He gets back into his truck and drives farther south as the sky lightens. A rabbit bounds across the road. A cormorant takes wing as Codey parks along Mule Run Road. He crosses a tidal creek, skirts a pile of hurricane debris, and heads south along a sandy ridge. An alligator lolls in a pond.
“All right, Mr. Hog, where you at?” Codey asks. “Probably laid up in some palmetto somewhere.”
He crosses more sloughs and hammocks. Three hours in and nary a hog to be found.
Suddenly, the forest crashes. A family of four hogs tries to escape into the swamp between palmettos. Codey gets two of them, the mama and a baby.
“Well, we didn’t come up empty-handed,” Codey says, smiling. “Let’s find us another and save some turtles.”
Codey makes a big difference on Ossabaw, particularly during the May-to-September turtle nesting season when he concentrates on the beach. In the five years before Georgia hired a marksman, 31 percent of loggerhead turtle nests were attacked by hogs or other predators. In the last five years, only 10 percent were.
I have a boat to catch, so Codey steers the pickup north on Willows Road. Two unsuspecting baby pigs race across the road and into the swamp. Codey doesn’t bother giving chase. He knows he’s got them on the run.