The Halloween pig's advice

"Pig out, kids, but try to share your candy with your little brothers and sisters. Okay?"

Invasion of the pigs

Old Tattered Ear showed up at two ponds.

The heat wave of August decided us to concentrate camera trapping around Chimineas's waterholes.

Until then we were unaware of the pig invasion.

Feral pigs are known on the ranch, but as pigs go they seemed well-mannered and their imprint on the landscape could only be described as a soft touch.

In 15 months of camera trapping we saw only one hog in hasty retreat, and we never recorded a pig on one of the cameras.

Until August they had left little sign around the waterholes, but the cameras captured their insouciant expressions as they imitated rototillers through the night.

In no time they converted to quagmires the grassy floodplains of three ponds.

Old Tattered Ear even demonstrated how he fertilizes his freshly worked areas.

In the wake of the invasion came the pig hunters.

Our photos show them shortly before 5:00AM stoically pussy-footing through the mud-works.

But they moved on and waited for porky elsewhere.

And wherever that was, porky didn't show.

California Fish & Game wants to limit the number of pigs on the ranch, because an outbreak of pigs can have devastating effects.

Pigs are just too good at competing with native species like bears, elk and deer, and they can wipe out pockets of rare species, like metamorphosing spadefoot toads.

A new hunt will soon be scheduled and the hunters will be informed of the pigs' latest haunts -- based of course on camera trapping records.

Sod-busting water-sucking pigs

In case you don't remember, back in May I set 6 camera traps in "McMillan country". Greg and Irv McMillan and a good-hearted adjacent property owner allowed me to set 6 cameras on their ranches in San Luis Obispo County. I set them all at springs where cattle weren’t being pastured.

Greg and I had trouble aligning our schedules for camera pickup, so he kindly collected and sent me the cams in August. They contained 724 photos taken over 263 camera trap days (# cams x # days active). There were 515 animal images, and the success rate (# animal pics/total # pics) was 71%.

Of the 20 species of birds and mammals photographed, feral pigs were the most common subjects. They accounted for 23% to 94% of the photos at each spring. The porkers arrived in sounders with as many as 11 members.



A particularly favored hangout was a spring in North Portuguese Canyon. Nights there were busy, and the rooting and wallowing habitues seemed to discourage other wildlife like snockered rowdies in a pub. A coyote and a bobcat appeared on nights when the pigs were away, or arrived before the pigs appeared.



Spanish missionaries brought pigs to California in the late 1700s, and gave them free rein to wander and fatten on the land. More pigs came with settlers from the eastern US and from Russia. The traditional free-ranging form of management led to very independent hogs. They picked their own mates and interbred, which made for a nice genetic hodgepodge. Californians can boast red and pink pigs, white pigs, mottled and spotty pigs, and black ones too.

In 1925 a rancher from Monterey County introduced descendants of Eurasian wild boar from the eastern US. The free-wheeling mongrels and wild boars found each other and multiplied. The phenotypic expression of the "wild type" genes can be seen in black-haired ridge-backed boars and the wee stripers.



The pigs colonized new areas in the state, and between 1992 and 2004 added another 7000 square miles to their range. In 1956 the state’s Department of Fish & Game listed feral pigs as big game, but sport hunting hasn’t dampened the pigs’ expansion or hold on the land. They are more prolific than deer, and when deer are scarce they tide over the mountain lions.

But they not considered desirable aliens. They’re just as good at trashing landscapes as careless bikers and ATV riders. They are also disease vectors and crop raiders, and were named as one source of E coli that infected crops a few years ago. And when it comes to springs and creeks, they don’t mind going doodoo in the water supply. They are not as good as deer at thermoregulating physiologically, so they wallow in mud and water to shed heat.

Biologically though, pigs are cool animals. They're bold and intelligent. The porcine snout is a remarkable endowment, a union card to the elite clique of soil-tilling and root-grazing omnivores that includes the hog-nosed skunk, the hog-badger, and to a lesser extent, the European badger.

The porkers’ rototilling omnivory raises a question: do they partly fill the niche of our defunct state mammal, the grizzly bear, and if so, should we learn to live with them?

The answer is that we’ll have to learn to live with them. Like a lot of other problems, the biological solution is not that hard, it’s just that people and economics make it next to impossible.


(Pig) "Goodnight Mr. Firefly". . . . . (Mr Firefly) "Gooooodnight."

References

A pdf of Dr Barrett's feral pig article

Wisconsin DNR on feral pigs

Eradicating pigs on Santa Cruz Island

A defense of pigs as ecological equivalents of grizzly bears

Some history of California's feral pigs

Cam C's final days

Greg McMillan kindly sent me the cams from San Luis Obispo county. They arrived as he had found them, covered with mud.

Greg wrote (a few weeks ago): "I brought back the cameras today. They have had a hard life. The Gillis Canyon camera and the Portuguese Canyon camera are totally muddied up although intact. The critters at the Fernandez Spring set seem to be a bit more civilized as there was no damage there."

"The camera we set up on my place was attacked. You drove a square tube post into the ground and there is a cross piece on the bottom 3rd. That post has a 45 degree bend at that crosspiece and another 22.5 degree bend about 8" from the top. It appears that something, probably a pissed off hog, hit it at high speed. Angered by the flash I assume. The camera box was opened and the camera was about 25 feet north of the scene of the accident and the box was 35. I will send the mount spike up for your perusal."

Look at the post on the right, good readers, and you will see how it is supposed to look.

Cam C was the casualty, and it looked like this when Greg put it back in the case.



It's hard to imagine how a hog removed it from the case. Perhaps a ninja pig charged the cam in response to the flash, and then rooted it, stepped on it, and gnawed at the case until it opened. Maybe it carried off the camera in its mouth, or snouted it forward like a hockey puck.

Maybe hogs dislodged it while rubbing against the post. Maybe that's how they bent the post. Pigs or even raccoons, which are attracted to shiny objects, could have pushed the camera around.

Or maybe it was the work of a vandal?

I know I drove the pipe into solid ground, but the mystery is how it or they bent the upper section. A person would have to wedge it in order to bend it.

And how did the case open? It wouldn't be hard for a bear, but it would be quite a feat for a hoofed animal. Perhaps stepping on it was enough to snap the catches.

Okay, I'll cut to the chase. The pictures on the memory stick didn't identify the attacker, but that's valuable clue.

In the first 2 weeks the camera didn't take a single picture. On the third week it took 4 pictures.



Something must have bumped the post, which redirected the camera to the ground where only a mouse could trigger a picture.

Because the camera was set for night time pictures we can only conclude that the attack took place in daylight and wasn't a response to the flash.

The attacker remains unidentified.