If there's an animal in Old Europe that brings together admiration, respect, fear, courage, wittiness and stregth, that must be, besides the brown bear, the Wild Boar (Sus scrofa).
Present throughout Continental Europe and recently recolonizing the British Isles, this extraordinary animal has Spain as one of its paradises.
The population reaches high numbers but, in contrast to Central and Northern European populations, you seldom find them in huge sounders. This might be an adaptation to Spain's montainous surface and the huge amount of food they can find almost everywhere and all year round. This fact makes wild boars presence common throughout the Country, but the lack of a big sounder that brings safety and protection to an indvidual makes them behave slightly different from other populations.
In here, boars are tough and ready to fight if they feel in real danger. And there's a fact that makes them extremely fearfull of humans: they are hunted all across the nation. This means that almost the entire population knows that after a dog comes a human, so, if they feel they can't escape easily, they will choose the quickest way, and that is to fight.
Here in Aragón, boar hunts are very traditional, and new farming techniques have risen numbers of boars to a point of plague in some places. The good news is that wild boar's meat is a delicacy and in rural Spain is one of the most popular dishes during the hunting season.
In my opinion, as for big game species is concerned, they are the most clever ones. Only if you have a trained eye you will be aware of their presence, although you might not even see them.
It always amazes me the capacity they have to hide in the smallest places without being discovered and at the same time leave such an amount of traces!
If they have prospected an area for food, the next morning it would look like a farmer has been there working. If they have taken a mud bath, the amount of rubs you can find in certain trees, rocks or other surfaces are enormous. Images speak loder than words.
A sounder of wild boars have spent a nice mud bath last night.
Huge rub after mud baths. That slim tree will probably die after a few more rubs.
You can clearly apreciate the rubbing areas against the tree and the floor.
As you might have noticed, taking mud baths and rubbing themselves against rough surfaces atferwards is one of their biggest pleasures. They usually have their favourites trees or rocks to do so, visiting them regularly, even to the point of killing a tree after many years of trunk damaging. You can also determine how long the boars have been there by the dampness of the mud and the freshness of the footprints.
Fresh footprint.
One of the tracks you might also find are feces, but I've always found them away from these "mud spas" they have. People think boars are dirty; nothing further from the truth. They are probably one of the cleanest animals you can find in our forests, even taking their every night mud bath.
A few days old feces.
I've had many encounters with boars in my life, and except a few times when I saw them before they saw me, the most common way was to incidentally flush them from a very close bush. You wouldn't believe their hiding skills, sometimes even having a six or seven member sounder inside a restaurant table sized bush.
Clever, strong, fierce and always alert. That is the legendary Wild Boar.
