Wild boar

Coarse Game – wild boar

All about the wild boar.

Class: mammals

Order: cloven-hoofed

Family: suidae

Species: sus scrofa

Biotope

Wild boars are true forest dwellers. They only feel at home in large, quiet forest complexes interspersed with agricultural areas. Such biotopes are found only in the Ardennes and the Veluwe, where their distribution area coincides with that of the red boar.
They are not very local. In one night they sometimes migrate for miles. By the time the first game damage is reported, they have often already settled somewhere else.
They are very fond of using a swampy or muddy spot in the forest to bask. The mud bath is not so much for cooling as it is a way to get rid of troublesome skin parasites. Next to a molting site are usually a few “barn trees” whose bark has been rubbed away to “hog height.

External Characteristics

Upon a chance encounter in the wild, even an ordinary hiker will not mistake the wild boar for another species. In terms of physique, it resembles a tame domestic boar immensely. However, unlike this tame variety, the wild boar is an expression of one and all primal strength and wildness.
It stands high on its legs. Especially the massive forehand is strongly developed. The conical head is equipped with strong jaws and excellent for digging up and breaking the soil in search of all kinds of edibles. The small eyes lie deep within the head. The mobile, erect ears are quite small. In older specimens, especially males, the skin at the level of the shoulders is tough and thick and forms the so-called shield.
The prints of black fowl are unmistakable because almost always the biting toes are printed along, creating a typical trapezoid shape.
The straight tail keeps moving almost constantly. When calmly taking up food it shuttles lustily back and forth. With excitement or alarm it is raised stiffly.

Age classes

The sow usually gives birth to her piglets (frislings) in the spring (April). Their woolly coat is yellowish brown with paler longitudinal stripes. As summer progresses, the darker winter hairs grow through. Gradually, the stripes disappear and the brownish-yellow juvenile color is pushed back.
One April is generally adopted as the date on which the frislings transfer to an older class, that of the defectors. Thus, a defector is a young in its second year of life. It is during this period that the primary growth and weight gains occur so that after that second year of life, black game can be considered nearly mature.

Propagation

Keilers older than two years become loners. They avoid the noisy frisling and turncoat rotters as much as possible. The older they get, the more suspicious and cautious they are. During the day they stay in quiet, very dense cover.During the ranching season (late November to early January) they lose their caution to seek out the sows, which are then in heat. They are not gentle lovers: there is a lot of thrashing and pushing with the sow sometimes screaming loudly.If two approximately equal-sized skuas meet during this period, they attack each other fiercely by banging their heads. Here, the thick shoulder shield must absorb the sharp tusks (guns) as much as possible.
Gestation lasts 115 days on average. A heavily pregnant sow will isolate herself from the rot of her then almost one-year-old friskies toward the end of March, sometimes a little earlier, to seek quiet, safe cover. There, under some dense spruce or thorn bushes, she sets up a spacious cauldron lined with branches, moss and ferns. In it she throws her little friskies weighing barely 1 kg (an average of 5 per litter). The piglets stay there for the first week. Only then do they gradually undertake further excursions. Squeaking and grunting, they follow their mother, constantly begging for milk.
The sow is a good mother, constantly on her guard.

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