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November / December 2011
Volume 23, Number 6

Opertation: Wild Hog

WARNING: SUSPECTS MAY HARM LIVESTOCK, CROPS, FIELDS, FENCES AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS. SHOOT ON SIGHT.

Counties work with AgriLife, Wildlife Services and Ag Department to manage problematic invaders

By Maria Sprow

Paul Fushille is hiking through a stream in the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve, talking about Black- Capped Vireos and Golden-Cheeked Warblers and the Jollyville Plateau Salamander. It turns out, all three are endangered or soon-to-be endangered species that are native to central Texas; in fact, the salamander lives only in Travis and Williamson counties.

Most people aren’t allowed back here, but Fushille is a natural resource specialist with Travis County. His job is to manage the preserve so that the songbirds and salamander and other native Texas species survive and thrive. But the preserve has some invaders that are destroying the habitat. Feral hogs, it seems, have begun calling it home.

That puts Fushille and the songbirds on a very long list of Texans who are concerned about the feral hog, and Travis County on the growing list of counties who are helping in the efforts to reduce the state’s feral hog population. Texas counties are supporting local AgriLife Extension educational workshops geared toward helping private property owners with their pest problems, hiring trappers to actively hunt the hogs, or both, and for good reason: the feral hogs are tearing up everything from ball fields and golf courses to ecological preserves to agricultural fields, costing Texas taxpayers hundreds of millions a year.

According to estimates by the Texas A & M University Institute for Natural Resources, there are anywhere between 1.9 million and 3.4 million feral hogs in Texas living in up to 79 percent of the state. And according to the best available estimates given by Texas Wildlife Services, each hog can do anywhere from $200 of damage a year in non-agricultural areas to an estimated $379 of damage a year in agricultural areas, adding up to an estimated $400 million a year statewide. That doesn’t include the collateral damage done when its success drives other species toward extinction, as is the complaint in the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve.

Fushille knows there are hogs around here, somewhere. They are difficult to find, but easy to see. The evidence is nearly everywhere. Fushille has just started his hike, but right away, he stops at a small cloud in the stream.

“See these kind of open pits in the stream?” he says, pointing at an indented spot along a trickling streambed, now looking more like a puddle, which a feral hog may once have muddied himself in. The mud bed is a problem, he says, because the salamander depends on a clean, bubbling-brook-type environment in which to live. Here, the brook isn’t flowing well. “You see they are kind of muddy?”

He keeps moving. There aren’t really man-made trails back here; the paths are mostly made by deer and hogs and other animals, and he maneuvers himself around brush and branches. Partly to save the salamander, the county is fighting its hogs.

It’s a long battle that started years ago, and for a while, the hogs were winning. Once upon a time, back in 2003 and 2004 and 2007, Fushille would see dozens and dozens of hogs on a single property. That doesn’t really happen much anymore; the drought has caused the hogs to retreat back into the bushes, at least for a while. But the hogs are smart survivors, and Fushille doesn’t think the drought will hold them off forever. When the drought ends, the hog numbers will return, and so the offensive front continues.

“If they were just eating leaves here and there, you know, we could probably handle them on a limited basis, but these animals are known to be just, they can change an ecosystem,” he says. “Pigs are horrible for water quality.”

Hogs are considered nuisance animals mostly because when they eat, they don’t just nibble, taking what they can off the top. Instead, they uproot everything in their dinner zone, turning already-struggling areas into straight up dirt. That behavior, combined with its reproduction rates (sows start reproducing around their first birthdays, usually have litters of six or more and reproduce every six months) and the fact that Texas hardly has a predator large enough to balance its population naturally, makes it necessary for ranchers, home owners, counties and other governmental entities to work together to manage the hog population.

That’s why more than 40 counties announced their intent to participate in the second annual Hog Out Month, a competitive hog abatement grant program administered through the Texas Department of Agriculture. The program is actually a three-month challenge that began in October and runs through December. To participate, counties must count the number of hogs captured within their borders for the three-month period and the number of participants who attend area hog abatement education programs. The top five counties will win grant funding for hog abatement programs.

The Hog Out challenge has helped raise awareness of the hog problem and its costs.

“When I ran across this grant, I presented it to the commissioners and said it doesn’t hurt to apply for it,” said Schleicher County Judge Charlie Bradley, adding that, at the time, area officials and landowners weren’t really aware that it may have a hog problem.

“Like a lot of counties out here in west Texas, we have a lot of absentee landowners and a lot of times they think, well, we won’t bother the hogs so we can hunt them and maybe sell hunts for wild hogs,” he said. “Once we kind of raised awareness and educated people on the things they should be looking for, I think they started noticing some things.”

The county worked with private trappers and its AgriLife extension agent and Wildlife Services department to hold educational seminars and wound up earning a $15,000 grant as part of last year’s Hog Out competition, Bradley said, and it is hoping to get another grant this time around. The county used the grant funds to build traps, contract with private hunters and rent a helicopter with which to find the hogs.

As part of its hog abatement strategy, Travis County relies mostly on private hunters with night vision goggles and heatsensing cameras and the like, Fushille said, though its AgriLife Extension Service does offer residents educational workshops about feral hogs.

Fushille has arrived at another part of the brook. This time, the edges of the stream are all dug up, muddy and missing any signs of vegetation. “See this torn up mud on the side?” he asks, spotting some tracks nearby. Evidence! “That’s them digging for grubs, for roots.”

Spot after spot through the preserve, Fushille finds more and more habitat damage caused by feral hogs.

“There is no other animal in Central Texas that does this amount of damage,” he says.

The Hog Out challenge isn’t the only way state and local agencies are fighting the feral hog invasion. During its last session, the Texas Legislature passed HB 716, which makes it legal for hunters to shoot feral pigs from helicopters. The decision was made after studies conducted by Texas AgriLife Wildlife Services showed that, in some areas, shooting pigs from helicopters is more cost-effective than setting traps or shooting at night.

In 2007, the Texas Legislature gave Wildlife Services $1 million to conduct feral hog abatement programs during the 2008-2009 biennium. The money went toward 19 different projects that assisted in the removal of 47,407 feral hogs, according to a Wildlife Services report, more than twice the number of hogs removed annually through normal wildlife damage management activities.

On average, the feral hog projects found that aerial shooting was the most costeffective method of controlling the wild hog population. While the average feral hog cost Wildlife Services $19.69, hogs shot from helicopters cost anywhere from $7.50 in areas with a high hog density to $40.06 in areas with a low density or a newly established hog population.

In one project, Wildlife Services used helicopters and other methods to eradicate or suppress a feral hog population in four Panhandle counties over fears that the feral hogs could pass on the Pseudorabies virus to domestic hogs in the area. In another project, Wildlife Services worked in four counties to protect peanut production and rangeland.

That project also focused on using helicopters and night shooting to clear the Buck Creek watershed of E. coli from a nearby feral hog population. In a third project, Wildlife Services helped Camp, Upshur, Wood, Hopkins, Smith, Fannin and Delta county landowners protect their corn crops and pastures. Other projects across the state focused on similar efforts.

Thanks to all the work, Wildlife Services was able to learn some important information about the feral hog population and the threats it poses. For instance, teams learned that the pseudorabies virus that threatens domestic pigs hits feral pigs by cycling through the population in a series of outbreaks; previously, it had been theorized that the virus was a chronic infection. Wildlife Services found that reducing the feral hog population directly reduces the potential for exposure to the virus.

The results of each project varied depending on the resources available; in Delta and Fannin counties, landowners came together in a cost-sharing cooperative to pay for helicopter hours. They managed to buy 19 helicopter hours, removing 1,421 feral hogs.

In nearby Camp, Upshur, Wood, Hopkins and Smith Counties, Wildlife Services spent resources on both ground hunting and aerial shooting. The 375 hogs shot via helicopter cost roughly $14.50 per hog; the 338 hogs shot via ground hunting cost $142 per hog.

But helicopter shooting doesn’t work as well in much of East Texas, where forests and tall trees protect the feral hogs. There, Wildlife Services sticks with conventional ground methods such as trapping and shooting in order to protect the area’s peanut, rice and wheat fields, ranges and even sea turtle nest sites. Which brings us back to those salamanders.

“Hogs are opportunistic,” Fushille says, walking to a fifth or sixth damage sight, where a feral hog has rubbed a tree raw while scraping off mud and parasites. “They probably, I doubt they get their mouths on salamanders that much, but if there is one, if they are feeding through and getting grubs, and they were to come across one, they are going to eat it. They are going to eat anything they can get their mouths on. Birds, nests, eggs, frogs…”

It’s easy to look at the feral hog damage and wonder: Where are these things? Are they watching us right now? But feral hogs are mostly active at night. They roam randomly throughout their home range and will move their range if there’s a lack of food or water or a disturbance. They are smart and people-wary.

All that makes hunting and trapping feral hogs somewhat difficult, Fushille says, especially when you’re working for a county and it’s just one problem on a long to-do list. The county sets its traps mostly between August and February, when the songbirds aren’t mating. Once a trap is set, checking it becomes part of the department’s daily routine so that no animals, hogs or otherwise, are left pinned and starving. That routine could go on for a week to a month. Success isn’t guaranteed. “There is definitely an art to hog trapping,” Fushille says. “All you can do is try.”

The county has just one trap set up in the Balcones preserve to catch the hogs, he adds. It’s a big, airy pen trap, as opposed to an alarming box trap, set up in a remote and abandoned ball field down the road with the help of nearby Concordia University students. It’s not right here in the center of the hog action because the location isn’t easily accessible to people and trucks – it’s hard carrying fencing into a nature preserve and the preserve is backed up to the Concordia campus.

But the field has shown evidence of hog activity in the past, and Fushille is hopeful the hogs will go back sooner or later. Right now, the trap has just been baited with piles of “rancid corn,” which hogs love and other animals usually don’t touch.

Fushille checks on the trap, and the bait is still there, most likely meaning the hogs have yet to rediscover the area. The trap looks good, inviting, unrestrictive: It’s set up along an old fence, so the hogs won’t be as scared of the new fence, Fushille hopes. The wind is blowing down toward the canyon, so the hogs will hopefully get whiffs of that corn soon.

Fushille explains the trap’s missing trigger mechanism. The key to a successful trigger, he says, is that it has to get triggered after the whole family of hogs is in the trap, not just one or two. So the trigger won’t actually be near the trap door, but wired around the back.

“So they’ll come in here and they’ll go along the edge or they might go straight for the bait, who knows, but chances are, usually they will kind of come in here cautiously, and the trigger will be on a wire. It’ll probably be fed through a couple points on the back side, and then it will be dropped down so that if something rubs against it, it puts tension on the trigger and the door will fall,” he says. “Well, that is what is supposed to happen. We’ll see.”