Wild boars

A Sow with her piglets

Our ranch is abundant with wildlife. One thing the environmentalists and many city dwellers do not understand about ranchers, is we are one of the largest conservators of rangeland. The cattle ranchers are the caretakers of millions of acres of oak woodlands, rolling hills and grasslands that are home to all the various species of wildlife across this nation.

Sow & piglets

Any given trip to the ranch, I try to bring my camera and have it ready to shoot. I have seen mountain lions, bears (rarely thankfully), bobcats, deer, bald eagles and wild pigs to name a few.

The wild pigs are a problem because they root up the pastures and it looks like someone took a disc to the field. They also populate like crazy! They can be bred by 12 months of age and have 2-3 litters of piglets a year. Typically they can have 8-10 piglets, but due to nature, I usually see 3 or 4 piglets per sow. I am guessing there is a high piglet mortality rate. This is the one animal we have to 'thin' out on the ranch routinely.

This year is particularly bad because of the draught. There have been news articles in our local papers about them coming into rural residential areas and destroying landscape, sprinklers. They can even be mean if provoked. Lately I have seen dozens of wild pigs. They are usually night animals, but this time they just looked for a minute before heading into the brush . People in subdivisions are having to call in help to control the populations.

On our most recent trip, we came across a dozen in the middle of the day. While I have always seen some pigs on occasion or seen evidence of them, they are so overpopulated now I have seen no less than 10 on every visit to the ranch! We have been working to 'thin out' some of the pigs. Such is life on a ranch.