At least we won't starve

[theozarkan]

So far they haven't made it to my garden yet but they are out there lurking around. Never had them around here until one showed up on my camera in 2018. This is where we are at today. I have a trap I'm working on. With this many mouths to feed I'm afraid they are going to start tearing stuff up.

[boiledpeanut]

Jeez,

its amazing how they give rats and rabbits a run for their money in terms of fertility (despite being a dozen times larger)

[macmex]

We've had them around our area for some years now. I'm pretty sure the only thing protecting our property is our livestock guardian dogs, which consider large wildlife to be intruders. They not only patrol our property, but also the 60 acre woods in front of our place, where the hogs sometimes show up.

 

[chrysanthemum]

I hear they’re actually pretty good eating.  Feral hog trapping and hunting are pretty big in this area.  Thankfully I’ve never seen one on our property.

Not too long after we had moved to Texas, our family took a trip to an Audubon Society preserve south of San Antonio.  There were big signs at the start of the walking trails which basically said that there were feral hogs around and that they were dangerous.  The advice on the sign said that hogs will charge straight ahead to attack, and the best strategy to escape was to move to the side and swing up into a tree.  This was not really very encouraging for me as a mother with four small children, the youngest of whom I was pushing in a stroller.  To top it off, there weren’t any real trees in sight, just some mesquite scrub.  We did go far enough down the path to encounter a more woody area, and thankfully we encountered no hogs at all.

Later that year I was outside at the front of our house where we had recently installed a rain tank.  There had been a slight leak at the faucet, and I had tightened it and dried it off.  I was sitting very quietly watching to see if there would be a drip when I heard a very loud sound.  It reminded me a bit of the sounds horses make when they ruffle their lips on an exhale.  (I’m not sure what horse people call that.)  The sound continued, and I thought, “I wonder if there’s a feral hog around the corner.”  I was in a sort of nook on the ground by a Mexican Oregano bush, and I slowly began to peek around to see what I could see.  Lo and behold, just a couple feet away from me there was ...  a hummingbird.  The beat of its wings near my ear was so loud I had thought it was a large animal.

Several times since then I have been startled by that same sound as those hummingbirds will move so quickly to an area, and I’ll hear them before I see them.  My kids love to tease me about how I’m so afraid of “feral hummingbirds.”

[heavyhitterokra]

My Great Uncle Emery Driver, born in the late 1880s related a story to us kids, back in my youth. The stories he told us were of frontier Oklahoma days, back when it was still known as, "Indian Territory." In one of these stories he told, there had been a woman from town who had gone missing for about a week and a group of men had been sent out on horseback to look for her.  (He was one of those young men in the search party).

Toward evening, on the second day, they found her body in the woods between Locust Grove and Chouteau. Since it was getting toward evening and they had no wagon to fetch the body back home, my Uncle Emery was assigned the task of spending the night there with the body, so that the hogs wouldn't eat it, while the other men rode back to town to get a wagon to haul the corpse back.

He'd tell us of spending the long, long, night out there alone, with a pistol, quaking at every little sound, thinking it might be a wild hog, and afraid to even unsaddle his horse, in case he had to make a run for it in the middle of the night. 

That story always made me  a little leery of letting our kids spend the night out in the woods around here by themselves. We live out in the country about twenty miles from Locust Grove, and while ticks are scarce in Autumn, Winter, or early-Spring, the kids would always want to bring friends over for a camping trip out in the woods behind our house.  I'd always go with them and sleep in a separate tent with a sidearm or some other weapon within reach. One night while camping out in the woods with the kids, we had a pretty good scare, even though it was only a false alarm. We had been eating a whole chicken, roasted on the fire and the kids had been throwing their bones out in the woods; some of them, not too very far away from the entrance of their tent.

About midnight, we heard something fairly large rooting around in the underbrush.  It sounded almost like it was tuning over logs.  At first, it seemed far away, but it kept getting closer, and closer, louder, and louder.  We could hear it rooting in the brush and could hear roots being torn from the ground as it went through the woods, digging around under the dry leaves.  Our imaginations ran wild!  Soon, it sounded like it was nearly touching the sides of our two tents.  We didn't have a dog there with us, so we were fairly sure the sound was coming from wild animals, but what kind of wild animals?

All I had with me that particular trip was a pole ax to chop firewood.  So, upon hearing the disturbance in the leaves growing louder and ever closer, I grabbed a flashlight and my pole ax and crept out the door to see what it was. To my great relief, it was only a hapless pair of armadillos, ransacking the campsite, digging holes with their foreclaws, looking for scraps of food.

Because of those old stories, to this day, I am self-conscious of wild hogs lurking in the woods at night.

[macmex]

When one of my neighbor friends was about 12, some cousins from the city visited him. They wanted to camp out, so he took them out on the 'back 40" and they set up a tent. During the night some of their cattle came over to inspect the tents, snuffing and blowing at the strange object. My neighbor had the bright idea to yell "It's a bear! and run out of the tent. Instantly his cousins overtook him and beat him to the house by a long shot. He thought this was a wonderful joke, but I'm not sure if he was grounded until he was 13.

[heavyhitterokra]

That just put a huge smile on my face, George. Thanks, for that!  I had cousins who lived in the city too.  Fun, fun!

I also had a similar experience with our cattle growing up.  It was one of those still winter nights when there was no wind at all, and huge flakes of snow had begun falling.  It just seemed surreal that it wasn't any colder than it felt outside at the time.  I had been rabbit hunting with the beagles and just decided to go home a get a canvas shelter half, and some wool blankets, and spent the night outside.  I didn't have a sleeping bag, so I took a canvas welding blind out of the shop and put two or three wool blankets on top of it and rolled myself up, like a woolen burrito.  

The next morning, when the sun first began to rise, I woke up to a scary situation.  It had snowed enough during the night to partially collapse the shelter half on top of my homemade sleeping bag and the cattle had mistaken it for a bale of hay.  They were butting heads and shoving one another around and stepped right next to where I was laying. 

It was a small miracle that I didn't get stepped on, but they didn't stick around long after I came out out of my blanket burrito, waving my arms, and yelling at the top of my lungs.  They were probably more startled at that point than I had been by them trying to eat my tent.