I’m just back from the International Wild Pig Conference, and I have bad news: feral hogs, wild pigs, invasive swine, or whatever you prefer to call them, are still a major problem. Shocker, I know. But I picked up a lot of good news from the fight against feral hogs, and I learned about impressive new science that can help you deal with wild pigs and their damage where you hunt.
The most notable news to me as a deer and habitat manager had to do with prescribed fire’s effect on wild pigs – and no, I’m not talking about literal barbecue.
Feral Hogs vs. Prescribed Fire
Kim Sash, Director of Biological Monitoring for Tall Timbers, shared the results of a study in the Red Hills region of South Georgia and North Florida. Kim and her co-researchers monitored the before-and-after effects of a large-scale USDA pig control project in the region. University of Georgia master’s student Chris Terrazas placed GPS tracking collars on 13 captured pigs and tracked their movements for a year. Meanwhile, UGA master’s student Kelsey Hoskins deployed 151 trail-cameras across 50,000 acres and ran them for 18 months. Randomly located in forested cover and not baited, the cameras simply documented all wildlife passing by.
When Chris analyzed the GPS data, a significant correlation emerged: wild pigs preferred areas that were fire-suppressed. The more recently the woods had been burned, the less likely pigs were to use that area. Feral hog activity made a significant jump at any site after three years without fire, which was a critical threshold.
“The more you increase time since fire, the more you’re creating pig habitat – and honestly reducing deer habitat,” said Kim. “When fire is suppressed, you get a mid-story shrub and hardwood layer, and pigs love those kinds of areas. It’s open enough underneath that they can move freely, but there’s dense overhead cover to shield them from the sun and keep them cool.”
Someone asked me recently how to keep pigs out of deer feeders. Based on this new research, my answer is: switch from feeders to prescribed fire, which produces high-quality natural deer food a lot more cheaply – with the bonus that it discourages pigs. Kim even suggested using prescribed fire to narrow the areas pigs will use, making them easier to trap.
“And if trapping pigs is too costly or takes too much time, at least you can make your property somewhat less appealing to pigs by using fire regularly,” said Kim. “Fire eliminates pig habitat.”
Feral Hogs vs. Wild Turkeys
For turkey hunters, there was another very interesting finding of the Tall Timbers study, and this came from the trail-camera monitoring. In areas with a heavy pig presence, wild turkeys were less active in the early morning and late afternoon, when pigs are more active. As seen in other studies, deer tended to avoid areas frequented by feral hogs. Wild turkeys were even more affected than deer by the presence of pigs.
“You still have turkeys where you have pigs, but the turkeys switched to a mid-day activity pattern to avoid pigs,” said Kim. “They were staying on the roost longer to avoid times when pigs are most active. Where pigs were trapped and removed during the study, turkeys went back to being more active in the mornings and evenings.”
In a similar study presented at the conference, Matt McDonough of Auburn University used trail-cameras to monitor wildlife response on four study sites. He removed pigs with a heavy trapping effort on three of the sites, while a fourth area served as the “control.” Camera detections of turkeys increased significantly in the three pig-removal sites but not in the fourth. This is not because pigs kill adult turkeys or destroy nests. It’s about space use: Turkeys see pigs as a threat and avoid them, just as Kim Sash saw in the Tall Timbers study.
“Removing wild pigs is another way to manage for wild turkeys and give them more access to the landscape for nesting and roosting,” said Matt.
Wild Pigs Damage Food Plots
We’ve had estimates of the total financial damage wild pigs cause to agriculture and other interests, but they are outdated or incomplete. And I’ve never seen an estimate that focused on specific areas of interest to deer hunters, like food plots. Now we have one. Peter Koppes and other researchers at Colorado State’s Department of Economics and USDA-APHIS conducted an exhaustive review of available data on damage caused by wild pigs to agriculture, forestry, native ecosystems, water quality, and more. They made conservative estimates of the total costs.
Their results indicated a minimum annual cost of $3.4 billion in damage by wild pigs (previous studies landed at less than $2 billion). Of that, they estimated wild pigs do $29 million in damage to wildlife food plots every year! Further, they estimated $8 million in damage to hunting leases – mainly infrastructure like access roads, which pigs like to destroy. Keep in mind, these damages are not spread evenly over the whitetail’s range but concentrated in those states where pigs are most abundant.
Fight Feral Hogs
After reading this far, you should be clear how I feel about wild pigs, but just in case I’ll spell it out: The National Deer Association wants feral hogs eradicated to prevent habitat destruction and competition with whitetails, turkeys and other native wildlife. We support statewide bans on live-hog transportation, encourage funding for state and federal task forces, and share information with hunters that helps them fight hogs where they hunt.
This is one of a four-part series of reports from the International Wild Pig Conference. Part 2 looks at long-distance movements of feral hogs by people, and where they are coming from.
This group hasn’t met in person in eight years, and there was a backlog of projects and research to be discussed. The agenda included 48 live presentations in two days, plus 13 student posters. To fit them all in, organizers scheduled many of the talks concurrently, so I had to choose which I could attend live. Stay tuned for more reports to follow that will help you manage or prevent wild pig problems where you hunt.
