If you’re like me, you don’t eat a lot of tortoise.  And when you do it’s probably on a frozen pizza.  Regardless of how you like your tortoise meat – in a taco, in a dip, with humus, or au gratin – know that getting it used to be a lot harder than it is today.

From roughly 1600 until the late 1800s sailors, explorers, pirates, and whalers supplemented their meager diets by hunting the small islands of the Pacific for feral goats and pigs.  But perhaps the most coveted, and most difficult, game to obtain was the giant tortoise.

I just returned from an aborted journey to Mexico’s Campeche state and a hunt for ocellated turkeys in the Yucatan.

The reason we scrubbed the hunt midstream had more to do with United Airlines and the cascading effect of cancelled flights than personal security, but a brush with Mexican authorities left me feeling a little uneasy. I was detained briefly at the airport on suspicion of being a drug smuggler. That sounds laughable now, but for a couple of very tense hours I struggled to see the humor in it.

My Guess? An Albino Alopecic Manatee After a Hard Night of Partying.

Two nurses walking their dog Sam on a lake near their hometown of Kitchenuhmaykoosib in Ontario, Canada…

Wait a minute…what the hell kind of crazy Canuck name is Kitchenuhmaykoosib? That name’s 18 letters long. How do schoolkids learn to spell a word like that? How do people who live there get their mail? Because the name of town sure doesn’t fit on any envelope I’ve ever seen. Okay, end of rant.