Some of my birdwatching colleagues have joked about solving one of the local exotic bird problems by promoting recipes for starling pie.

Starlings, which were introduced to the United States in the late 19th century, often outcompete woodpeckers, bluebirds and even purple martins for nesting cavities and are despised as a result.

But you can’t cook them if you can’t kill them and that’s a problem that Jackson Landers explains in a new  book titled Eating Aliens  (Storey Publishing, North Adams, Mass., 226 pages, $14.95).

The book catalogs Landers’ adventures and misadventures traveling the country in search of invasive exotic animals that are worth killing and eating.

Starlings and rock pigeons, he admits, eluded him.

It’s not that they’re hard to hunt, it’s just that most of the places in which they live–urban areas–don’t allow hunting.

“As I discovered, ubiquitous doesn’t mean easy to hunt,’’ he writes.

But he had better luck with other invasive species, including some found in Florida.

The book opens with his quest for black spiny-tailed iguanas on Gasparilla Island southwest of here and green iguanas in the Florida Keys.

Iguanas, whose numbers in Florida were knocked back a  bit by the severe freezes a couple of years ago, are pest lizards that devour suburban gardens.

An uncontrolled population of them at Bahia Honda State Park in the Florida Keys eliminated one of the last known populations of the endangered Miami blue butterfly by gobbling the plants on which the butterflies laid their eggs.

If you want to add iguana to your dinner menu, ignore everything but the tail and legs because there’s not much meat on the rest of the body, Landers advises.

He described it as having the taste of chicken and the texture of crabmeat.

Adding them to the menu here is just a matter of cultural customs.

Landers explained what we call exotic invaders in the United States are often “prized foods” elsewhere in the world.

As the narrative proceeds and Landers hunts more exotic species while conferring with chefs and fellow foodies about recipes, the notion of what to call what he’s doing emerges.

The term invasivore seems to stick. He credits James Gorman of the New York Times for the coinage.

From Florida, Landers jumps to the Bahamas to hunt for lionfish, an exotic fish introduced from the Indian Ocean that has poisonous spines, but delicious meat.

Florida wildlife officials are encouraging people to go after these fish, too, because they prey on native fish and have the potential to upset marine ecosystems.

Those aren’t the only fish he goes after.

Landers also tries his hand catching tilapia, Asian carp, armored catfish and northern snakeheads.

As many of you know, there are plenty of tilapia and armored catfish here in Polk County.

The only bird besides starlings and rock pigeons on the list is the Canada goose, which has become a pest in many parts of the country because large numbers of them no longer migrate.

One of the biggest challenges for hunting them was getting a pair of them to fly so he can take a sporting shot at them, he said.

After having good luck with wild hogs and armadillos, Landers is frustrated hunting nutria in Louisiana.

For a rodent-like mammal that’s supposed to be ubiquitous and the bane of the bayous, these creatures eluded Landers at almost every turn.

He finally gets a clear shot and heads off to a friend’s kitchen to see what it tastes like.

The tastes of many of these exotic creatures is unvarying.

“Sure enough, it tasted like chicken,” he writes. “By now I’d eaten a lot of things that tasted like chicken; every reptile has tasted like chicken.”

Not wanting to leave any part of the animal kingdom untried, he also snags a couple of invertebrates–European green crabs and Chinese mystery snails.

He said the crabs had promise, but the snails offer French escargot no competition.

This was a fun book, though to keep it topical, he might have tried to hang out with a python hunter in the Everglades.

They probably taste like chicken, too.