Pat’s Wildways: Eating Iguana

Ever since we started routinely going to Belize, I’ve been wanting to eat an iguana. As all my friends know, I love to try different exotic foods — tarantulas in Cambodia, monkey stew in Liberia, mopane worms in Botswana, swarming locusts plucked from the sky and roasted over candle flames at a remote camp in Thailand — nothing daunts me. But until recently, iguanas have been on my bucket list to no avail.

I’ve read that in Central America, where green iguanas are rampant, many people eat them, and they are called various names, such as “bamboo chickens” and “chicken of the trees.” In South Florida, where non-native green iguanas have become pests, there are a few iguana recipes circulating, but so far, I have not met anyone who partakes.

But surely in Belize, where many people live close to the forests, I could find some iguana meals, right?  Well, it has not been easy. My go-to chef Julie at Kendra’s Kitchen near my hotel does not eat iguana herself but said if I were able to get some cleaned and processed, she would cook it for me.  But no one I could find in Placencia hunted iguana. Here in Placencia Village, green iguanas are plentiful but they seem to be admired by locals, who know the individual green iguanas that live around them. At my hotel, during a rooftop breakfast, Bucko and I always see the same large iguana overlooking us from its perch high in a nearby tree. Many times I have mounted the steps up to our second-floor room and found a large green iguana on the steps ahead of me or a smaller one sunbathing on top of my door frame. Although Carolyn, the property manager, maintains a beautiful potted plant garden on our second-floor balcony and hates when the iguanas climb up the stairs to eat her bleeding heart flowers, she tolerates them, often with amusement. No one in Placencia, it seems, eats iguana, so I had about given up.

But serendipity has a way of entering my life. This past visit, like other times, I hopped on Jason William’s boat tour to Monkey River as an unpaid guest to ride the 35 minutes out to remote Monkey River Village, a place only reachable by a 2 ½-hour bad road to the nearest town or a powerboat ride, which many villagers have no access to. Each visit to Belize, I bring maybe 50 pounds of children’s books from the Fernandina Library book sale for the small school there — as much weight as we can carry in our two free bags with Delta Airlines. While the rest of the passengers continue up the river with Jason for the Monkey River tour, I walk through the village to the school, where I interact with the three classrooms of kids, only about 30 of them now, from age 4 to 14 or so. Once I brought nature and geography supplies, including inflatable globes that I tossed out to the kids and had them pick a spot on it for me to tell them about. Sadly most of the kids had no idea about what a globe was. Most picked something brightly colored to ask about and I found myself stretching my imagination to tell them more and more about the brightest red color on the globe — Kyrgyzstan. Luckily I had been there and had a lot to say. On other visits I just read a book to them. The kids all know me by now and flock around me to play and show off during their breaks. Fun!

So, this trip to Monkey River Village with my boxes of books was not unusual. But here’s where the serendipity comes in. The principal, Stephanie, met me at the boat dock with two strong older students to carry my heavy boxes of books to the school. As Stephanie and I walked down the dirt path to the school at the end of the small village (less than 200 residents), we started talking about iguanas, and I mentioned I had never tasted one. And unbeknownst to me, Stephanie left the school when I was reading to the kids to rustle up some iguana for me. It turns out that it was nearing the end of the official iguana hunting season and one villager, Danette, was cooking up iguana at the time. And, during the school lunch break, Danette showed up with a smile and a hot bowl of curried iguana meat and eggs!

Wow! Yes, indeed the iguana meat tasted “like chicken,” white meat on small bones. Delicious. And best yet were the iguana eggs. Danette carefully schooled me on how to eat the eggs.  They were tough, leathery globes, which you had to bite into and squeeze the contents into your mouth. They were wonderful — mostly all a creamy cooked deep yellow yolk, far tastier than any egg I’ve ever sampled.

So now I’ve removed iguana from my culinary bucket list. But there are other things on my list, too. Stay tuned ...

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com