Rhinestone Pete
Plinker
I normally hunt early bow season and gun season to fill my deer tag(s), but this year my family decided that we wanted to go somewhere warm for vacation during Thanksgiving week. Which meant I only had opening weekend for gun season and had no luck. So I did a little google search to see what kind of hunting opportunities there were while we stayed in Puerto Rico all week. The only thing that came up was Iguana hunting. I thought to myself this should be very interesting. So apparently the green iguana is an invasive species and is considered the green plague in Puerto Rico and is devastating the farming on the island. So what the heck, let's book it! So for $150, I got a 3 hour hunt with TWO guides. I met the guides at a Burger King and only one spoke English, the owner only spoke Spanish. Surely nothing bad would happen to an Americano following a couple Puerto Ricans into the hillsides! As I'm following the guides, of course many things come to mind, but YOLO! Anyways, they seem to get turned around a little as we're navigating the narrow roads in the suburbs of a small town to come to our "hunting grounds". I thought, what the hell am I doing? We pulled into the driveway of what we would think around here as a homesteader. He had a couple goats, some scrawny chickens in a cage, and a barren yard of pasture. But he also had some trees in his back yard and some heavy vegetation, and yes you could see several iguanas in one of the trees. My thought originally was are we hunting here for the entire 3 hours? Anyways, he hands me my .22 scoped air rifle and we headed on back to the trees. After a very brief safety briefing, we started my hunt. We are at tree #1 and I started shooting. I would have never thought that there could be that many iguanas in a single tree, I probably fired at least at 20 different targets. And yes, you have to have head shots to kill them. Unsupported, 80+ degrees in humid climate, for nearly 3 hours. It was exhausting, but it was a blast. I would shoot an iguana and if it fell, we'd just look for another target if they didn't move far, or just keep circling the tree until we engaged another. I'd say in one tree, I dropped close to 20 iguanas. In particular, there was a tree that was kind of barren of leaves and I dropped every single one of them, probably close to 15. Got a couple in the palm trees near by, but they were typically in the thicker trees with heavy cover. After about 1.5 hours, I was getting really sore in my neck from the constant looking up to find my targets. These things are tough as can be too, if you don't hit them right, they just hang on for dear life in the trees. So I just kept firing till they would fall. I even had to shoot some of the ones that did fall again in the head because they were still alive, not moving, just breathing. I finished up my hunt earlier than the three hours, just got too exhausted from the heat and my neck was killing me. All in all, it was a great experience, and definitely the cheapest guided hunt I've ever been on. If anyone ever visits Puerto Rico, I highly recommend it. Only a half day hunt with lots of trigger time. By the end of the hunt, my guides estimated 60+ kills, of course you couldn't count them all as some were hanging in forks or limbs of the trees and some were not recovered in some of the heavy overgrowth under the trees. Hats off to the guys at Los Iguaneros de Aguada! I seen they even posted me on their facebook page. Here's a couple pics for the heck of it.