Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Hogs!
We were visited by feral hogs last night, the first time we've had them since we moved here. They've been around all along and have visited neighbors, but we had been spared until now.
They are looking for grubs in the soil and plow lawns in the process. For us, they chose our best stand of grass. It's a spot where we had struggled to get grass and had finally this past spring invested in a very expensive mixture of seed, fertilizer, and soil to get grass established. It was beautiful.
The feral hogs are descendents of domestic pigs that either have escaped or been turned loose. Many years ago, before blight wiped out the chestnut trees, farmers would mark their hogs and turn them loose in the woods to forage. Some of our hogs may even be descendants of those pigs. Also, hunting clubs imported European Boar, some of which also made their way into the wild. Those boar are thought to have bred with domestic sows. Whatever their genealogies, our feral hogs are destructive, dangerous, and generally unwelcome.
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Luckily there are no hogs here in Wiltshire- well, no wild ones at least! What a shame about your garden. I've only seen wild European boar once and that was in Italy,near Lucca. A mother and some little ones ran across the road one evening. The babies were so sweet, all striped like humbugs but I wouldn't have wanted to meet the father!
ReplyDeleteWhat a shame your grass got ruined. Hogs are not a problem we have in England - though my friend has badgers crossing her garden and they wear a path across the grass.
ReplyDeleteI hear we have feral hogs in our area but so far they haven't come to call.
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