boars

an old trick to know what time of night wild boars appear

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In the Middle Ages, tracking a wild boar was such a valuable skill that some nobles they spent whole days to interpret footprints, disturbed mud and almost invisible signs to find out where the animal had spent the night. In fact, the great wild boar hunts depended much more than reading the terrain than force or weapons, a tradition that survived for centuries even after the emergence of more advanced technologies. The trick that hunters of yesteryear used. Long before camera traps or drones existed, hunters resorted to simple and ingenious solutions to find out what time wild boars appeared. One of the most curious methods consisted of connect an alarm clock to a fishing line placed next to a bait station. When the animal moved a stone or touched the line while eating, the battery jumped and the clock stopped, recording the exact time of visit. The system had limitations and could fail due to rain, other animals or simple mechanical errors, but it reflects the extent to which knowing the habits of the wild boar has always been valuable information for those who lived with this species. A very adaptable animal. The obsession with understanding the wild boar has a simple explanation: it is one of the mammals most adaptable in Europe. Its varied diet, intelligence and high reproductive capacity allow it to thrive in forests, crops, marshes and even environments close to cities. This ease of taking advantage of any available resource has driven the growth of their populations during the last decades and has turned the species into a constant challenge for wildlife managers, farmers, conservationists and hunters. When population control disappears. The increase in specimens is especially visible in some protected areas where hunting activity was eliminated or significantly reduced. The ban on hunting in national parks was presented as a victory for conservation, but the passage of time has revealed that the absence of regulatory mechanisms also can cause problems. The debate, therefore, no longer revolves solely around the protection of animals, but about how to prevent a particularly successful species from altering the balance of the ecosystem. The alarm in Doñana. He most striking case is occurring in the Doñana National Park in Spain. Organizations such as Ecologistas en Acción and SEO/BirdLife have alerted that nest predation by wild boars is affecting the reproductive success of protected species such as the common blackbird and purple heron. The situation is especially striking because some of the groups that defended the elimination of hunting in these spaces are now those who warn of the effects of an increasingly abundant wild boar population. No nests and threatened species. The damage does not only affect those birds. In various areas of the marsh, wild boars have entered colonies of breeding and have destroyed eggs and chicks of species such as the slender-billed gull, the black-winged stilt, the white-faced vent or the pratincole. The ability of the wild boar to locate food and taking advantage of any opportunity makes these nesting areas especially vulnerable targets. Images of severely damaged colonies have reopened a debate that seemed closed about how to manage certain wildlife populations. Nature does not understand ideologies. Beyond the crossed accusations between conservationists and representatives of the hunting world, the Doñana episode has put an uncomfortable question on the table: managing wildlife requires practical decisions in addition to conservation principles. Hence the old alarm clock connected to a fishing line symbolized the effort to understand an animal that is difficult to observe. Today the tools are much more sophisticatedbut the challenge remains the same. The better we know the wild boar, the more evident it becomes that its extraordinary ability to thrive can become a problem when the mechanisms capable of maintaining balance with the rest of the ecosystem disappear. Image | PXHereRichard Bartz In Xataka | Neither drones nor snipers: wild boar hunters in Barcelona have a simpler natural and home remedy In Xataka | The technological war that we see in Ukraine has an unexpected replica in Barcelona: this time the enemy is thousands of wild boars

one where snipers and drones are eliminating thousands of wild boars

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In November 2025, the Generalitat came to deploy to the UME, drones and police controls around Collserola after finding dozens of dead wild boars near Barcelona. What started with two infected animals ended up turning the city’s forests into a huge crawl area sanitary. A city at war. For years, wild boars were a growing nuisance in Barcelona and its metropolitan area: animals that rummaged through garbage, crossed roads or appeared in housing estates next to Collserola. In 2026 the situation completely changed scale. The detection of African swine fever turned part of Catalonia into a huge health perimeter where the Generalitat began to unfold a response typical of an emergency operation. Ground zero around Cerdanyola was surrounded by fencesclosures of wildlife passages, collective traps and access restrictions. More than 1,900 troops work on the ground while drones, canine units and specialized companies “comb” forests and peri-urban areas looking for corpses, sick animals and groups of wild boars. I was counting a few days ago The Country that the political language stopped seeming environmental to approach that of a military campaign: “empty” entire areas, “eradicate” outbreaks and contain the spread of the virus before it reaches the Catalan pork industry. The massive hunting of thousands of animals. The magnitude of the operation explains to what extent the Generalitat considers the situation a strategic threat. The initial objective was to eliminate between 8,000 and 10,000 wild boars in the 20-kilometer radius around the outbreak detected in November 2025. The figure was later adjusted about 6,000 animals only within the critical perimeter, while the general plan aims to reduce the entire wild boar population in Catalonia by half, estimated between 120,000 and 180,000 specimens. Since January they have already sacrificed more than 26,000 animals throughout the community. In some points of the so-called “ground zero” there would be barely twenty wild boars left after months of continuous captures. He deployment includes hundreds of traps, Pig Brig nets, thermal visors, closures of wildlife crossings and constant controls to prevent animals from crossing natural corridors around Barcelona. Snipers, hunters and wildlife control companies. One of the most striking elements of the entire crisis is how hunters have gone from being a socially questioned figure to becoming in essential piece of the operation. Some act practically as specialized shooters in forested and peri-urban areas where drones perform poorly and animals move near inhabited areas. Many describe night shifts with thermal visorshigh-capacity traps and rifles prepared to shoot any specimen that appears in front of the viewer. The Generalitat has even started financing fuel, veterinary assistance for capture dogs and specialized material. At the same time, the Government has hired companies accustomed to operating in urban and peri-urban environments, especially in Collserola and other spaces where wild boars have become accustomed to coexisting with the city. The result is increasingly reminiscent of a permanent campaign wildlife control deployed around a large European capital. A gigantic economic threat. Behind this offensive there is a fear much greater than the overpopulation of wild boars itself. Catalonia concentrates an essential part of the pork industry Spanish and the expansion of African swine fever could cause a multimillion-dollar blow to exports, farms and international markets. Japan and the Philippines already restrictions have been applied and the Government fears losing health credibility if the virus escapes the controlled perimeter. That is why the institutional discourse insists so much in “biosecurity” and the need to act extremely quickly. The Catalan administration defends that it is not an ideological or political decision, but rather a a mandatory response to avoid an economic collapse. The pressure is so high that a debate has even been opened about accelerating the marketing of game meat to absorb the tens of thousands of catches and keep the system economically viable. The battle inside Collserola. The big problem for the authorities is that the war against wild boars is taking place in one of the environments most complex possible: a huge metropolitan area of ​​four million inhabitants. Collserola functions as a natural refuge and motion runner for animals accustomed for years to living next to housing estates, roads and peripheral neighborhoods. Some areas are so wooded that not even drones They allow us to accurately calculate how many copies remain. Technicians recognize that total control is extremely difficult and that is why restrictions on mobility and access to the natural environment remain in force months after the start of the crisis. Meanwhile, they continue new positives appearing week after week, fueling the feeling that the Generalitat is in a race against time to prevent the outbreak from spreading definitively beyond Barcelona. The city-nature relationship. The crisis has also left an uncomfortable image about how the relationship between big cities and wildlife has changed. For years, Barcelona lived with a growing population of wild boars that learned to take advantage of garbage, parks and urbanized areas. The animals lost their fear of people while administrations tried to manage the problem without resorting to massive slaughter campaigns. The african swine fever It broke that balance suddenly. Now the city lives surrounded by controls, restrictions and capture operations where police, hunters, veterinarians and wildlife specialists participate. The scene of teams searching forests with dogs, nets and rifles a few kilometers from densely populated areas has ended up projecting a strange sensation: that of a great European capital converted into the epicenter of a health war against thousands of wild animals. Image | Pexels In Xataka | The problem is not that 100 wild boars in Barcelona have swine fever. The problem is that we don’t know how it got there. In Xataka | The Argentine sea hid one of the most disturbing animals in the world: an 11-meter-long “ghost jellyfish”

We had been wondering for years why the Chernobyl wild boars were so radioactive. The answer was not in the accident

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Four decades after the accident at the nuclear power plant located in Prypiat, the animals of Chernobyl they continue generating fascination. These survivors in one of the most contaminated regions in Europe they surprise us in many ways, but if there is an enigmatic species in this place it is the wild boar. One of the most radioactive species from Chernobyl. Solving the mystery. In 2023 it appeared a new trackrevealed by a team of researchers, about these animals: we finally know why their radioactivity is greater than that of other species. The answer has less to do with the nuclear accident itself than with something that happened long before. More radioactive? There is very little we still know about the animals of Chernobyl. One of the most curious enigmas was that of wild boars. To understand why we have to talk about one of the most polluting radioactive isotopes, caesium 137 (Cs137). The half-life of this isotope (the time in which half of the atoms we have of the material will have disintegrated) is just over 30 years. The concentration of cesium in the food chain should in principle be reduced even further since the atoms tend to leach into the soil or be carried away by water into rivers. Going down. That is why the level of radioactivity in animals such as deer or roe deer has decreased significantly in the area. Not only has this situation not occurred in wild boar populations: their radiation levels have remained almost constant, that is, the decrease is not even in line with what the semi-disintegration of Cs137 would imply. It is the “wild boar paradox”. Nuclear tests and radioactive truffles. The answer comes from cesium 135. The team that solved this mystery did so by focusing not on the radiation levels but on its origin. They verified that it was this other isotope of cesium that was behind this phenomenon. Cs135 has a much longer half-life, which explains why the reduction had been smaller. This also makes it more difficult to detect the presence of Cs135. As explains the responsible team From the study, each type of nuclear incident has its own “signature.” It is estimated that 90% of the Cs137 present in Europe was released by the Chernobyl accident, but this is not the case for Cs135. The origin of this is 68% in the nuclear tests carried out in the context of the cold war. Just the right depth. The diet of wild boars has also been one of the key factors when it comes to understanding the reason for their radiation levels. These animals feed on a type of truffle (Elaphomyces) that grows in the subsoil, at depths of between 20 and 40 centimeters. As we pointed out before, part of the radioactive cesium It was seeping year after year into the soil of the area. At the rate of a few millimeters a year, cesium (both from nuclear tests and from the accident) has been advancing towards these depths, contaminating these mushrooms, a source of food for wild boars. From Chernobyl to Bavaria. The study that clarified this mystery was carried out by analyzing a population of 48 wild boars in the state of Bavariasouthern Germany. The analysis details were published in the magazine Environmental Science & Technology. In the long term. The results of the study invite us to think that the situation will not change in the short term. That is, it is unlikely that the radioactivity levels of wild boars will begin to decline in the coming years until they are equal to those of other similar animals such as deer or roe deer. The greater radiation present in these animals has made hunters resist their capture. This implies that the populations of these wild boars will go increasing in the future. Perhaps their expansion through central Europe will cause the radiation levels of these animals to decline generation after generation but, from what we have seen, this process could still continue for decades. In Xataka | When Chernobyl exploded in 1986, Spain was freed from the radioactive cloud. AEMET has now discovered that it did it for very little In Xataka | Some Spanish scientists are recreating the Chernobyl accident in Seville. Objective: see how it affects biodiversity Image | Joachim Reddemann / Кирилл Пурин *An earlier version of this article was published in July 2024

Wolves, bears and wild boars are dividing up the map of Spain and the real battle is between the rural world and the cities

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Wolves, bears, vultures, cormorants, wild boars, lynxes… When, a few months ago, Christian Gortázar, professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, was asked about Spanish wildlife, his words were tremendously accurate: “the problem is everywhere.” And dozens of species are being redistributed throughout traditional territory while rural and urban society confront each other over something extremely basic: what the hell nature is and what it is for. Why are we talking about this? Complaints from the agricultural sector about wildlife have been with us for years. However, in recent months (and spurred by the African swine fever crisis) the “mismanagement” framework has been gaining weight in public debate. But the truth is that the idea that “there are many animals and no one controls them” is not innocent. It is, in reality, a ‘discursive umbrella’: an idea-force that brings together very heterogeneous demands (the cuts from the future CAP, the fears derived from the Mercosur treatybureaucratic burdens, rising costs, rural identity, etc.). That is the main reason why the political debate does not fit with the scientific one, but not the only one. How to survive the end of the field. Talking about Spain being emptied today is almost obvious: 62% of Spanish municipalities has lost population since the nineties. In Castilla y León and Asturias that figure is around 85%. For the urban population it is only a sociological question, for the rural population it is an existential question. And in that context, the wolf has expanded to the southeast, the bear has doubled its area of ​​influence and the wild boar has sneaked into towns and neighborhoods (causing a complete economic and health earthquake). Regardless of the real effect of conservation measures on the rural world, it is easy for the feeling of general abandonment to curdle into an aversion to this way of seeing the countryside. A legitimate debate. From an ecological point of view, species recovery makes sense (as long as it is done properly). Degraded ecosystems lose the ability to adapt and become much more fragile: recovering species is the simplest and most cost-effective strategy. But we must not forget that these species return to a world completely different from the one they left and that the gaps they left are now occupied by “de facto powers” and realities historically established in the countryside and that still survive. And those powers They maintain that the ‘intervention’ of cities In their world it is counterproductive. The debate, as I say, is legitimate (and even healthy). And then? The real problem is not the discussion about whether the resources allocated to recovery measures would be better invested in other policies. The problem is that in the public debate the data and arguments are missing; and everything has become a partisan quagmire that is very difficult to manage. But the wildlife is still there. And the farmers too. In fact, all the actors who have taken us here are still there. The fundamental question is whether there is a future that can be understood as a solution. Image | Nancy Stapler In Xataka | Wolf hunting throughout Spain depended on a red button that changes its status. And Europe has decided to press it

kill all the wild boars that were in the country

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In summer 2020, German authorities found the first wild boar infected with African swine fever. The world was distracted by anemia, but the global pork market shook. Germany was the largest pork producer in Europe and, if we had learned anything from the disease, it is that its voracity knows no limits. With the plague in the heart of the Union, it was a matter of time before it reached everywhere and, however, one small country said no: Denmark. 68 kilometers. That is the length of the border between Denmark and Germany. It seems like a purely colorful piece of information, but in this context it has a very concrete meaning: in Christiansborg they came to the conclusion that the spread of the virus could be stopped. In fact, the Danish government had already started to build a fence one and a half meters high to stop the intrusion of wild boars into the country in 2019. Detections of infected animals in Poland began to make them nervous. However, they quickly realized that it was not enough. And they decided to eradicate them one by one. It is true that in the Danish case this was also relatively acceptable. After all, although eradicating a species is difficult, the Scandinavian country was only home to just over a hundred specimens. The effort was extensive and exhaustive, but by the end of 2021 the government announced that the species was exterminated. In December 2020 they had finished with the last copy, number 157. Denmark is, in fact, one of the countries where the swine fever virus has not yet been detected. Is it viable to do it in Spain? The truth is that no. Spain, according to the Hunting Resources Research Institutehas 1,200,000 wild boars roaming its mountains. It is no longer that the effort necessary to exterminate them would be immense, but that the socioeconomic consequences would also be immense. Dozens of ecosystems would be unbalanced and we would enter a more than swampy terrain. However, things can be learned from Denmark’s decision. Above all, when we talk about this type of illness, the measures must be drastic and proactive. We have been waiting for this to happen for years and we have been extremely lucky that it has happened days after signing the agreement with China that allowed us to ‘regionalize’ the outbreak. Otherwise, the problem would have been enormous. 8,000 million. That is the number, which according to expertsis at stake due to the outbreak of African swine fever in the Sierra de Collsarola. And, for now, it is not at all clear whether we will be able to get out of this quagmire unscathed. Image | Markus Winkler | Danny Kroon In Xataka | 14 dead wild boars have become the greatest threat to Spanish livestock farming in 30 years. And all for a sandwich

The walls of a medieval church of Álava hid figures of wild boars, turkeys and discs. No one knows what they do there

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Cruces, Statues of saints, fresh with biblical scenes, representations of the Virgin Mary or the apostles, even devil figures twisting. Within a church one expects to find a wide range of Christian imagery, but when A few years ago Historians began to clean the oldest wall of The Church of ArbuloIn Álava, they found something very different. Under layers and layers of lime and paint began to appear something other: figures of the 12th century that show mysterious quadrupeds with claws, faced birds and wheels. Now the experts They wonder What the hell do they mean. In a place in Álava … More specifically in Arbulo, in the municipality of Elburghe stands An ancient church in honor of San Martín de Tours. Most of the temple we see today rose between End of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the XVI, but its builders left the remains of a previous building, from the Romanesque era. Despite its historical value over time the Church ended in a dilapidated state. At the end of the XX its roof deteriorated and began to leak water through the vaults, which among other things ended up the furniture. Rescue Restorers. The temple situation was so critical that it was closed Between 1999 and 2008 and by 2004 a restoration was launched that included the disenchanted of the walls. The specialists had good reasons to do so. As remember Historian Gorka López de Munain, from the University of the Basque Country (UPV), moisture forced to remove the altarpiece and disagree with the walls of the apse, which left the layers of paint accumulated over the centuries, including what seemed “strange motifs of reddish hue.” What kind of paintings? The experts appreciated several layers on the walls, but there was a specific one that caught so much the attention of López de Munain that he decided to dedicate A broad article in Of half avo. Which? The first, located in the Apsid wall and that in the absence of more detailed analysis the researcher date between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so it is associated with the primitive Romanesque temple. Today we know that their author (or authors) traced them using ocher pigments mixed with binder and that they did not remain too exposed. Before the XV they were already covered with a new layer of lime. And the big surprise arrived. The most curious thing is not, however, with what pigments were prepared, but what they were used for. In a Christian temple one would expect to meet symbols associated with that creed: crosses, representations of Christ and the Virgin, biblical scenes … not on the wall of the Church of Arbulo. Over there, In words of the UPV teacher, what appeared were representations of animals and geometric shapes “in a seemingly random disposition.” In a wide surface, of just over 24 square meters (m2), experts found remains that at origin had to decorate the head of the primitive church and have bullow the curiosity and imagination of historians. “In this first layer, reasons of great variety and formal wealth were painted: swine -siled quadr The article of Of half avowhich recognizes that the figures of the absidal wall of the Church of Arbulu “do not respond to the best known repertoires of their time.” “Something unexpected”. López de Munain is not the only one to which the images of the temple have surprised. In 2018, in An interview With eitb.eus, Isabel Mellén, of the project ‘Medieval Álava’, I recognized His enthusiasm. “What was painted, in our eyes, is something unexpected. What we hope to find in a church are religious paintings, with Christian scenes or symbology, but what is shown in Arbulo has nothing to do with all that,” collects the analysis of the Basque chain. Instead of pantocradors or crosses What they show The walls of the temple with thick strokes and reddish tones are beasts: birds, animals with pigs or wild boars, discs with radios, asterisk shape of lis flowers drawn with basic and rough lines … a peculiar iconography that leaves a question as fascinating as difficult to answer: What do you mean exactly? Questioning the story. From the outset and after clarifying how difficult it is to interrogate the images in search of meanings with the eyes of the 21st century, the researcher slides an idea: at least part of the figures seem to reveal a funeral connotation. For example, among the images rescued in Arbulo there are real turkeys, a recurring theme throughout the Middle Ages, loaded with polysemy and has been used regularly in mortuary contexts. “The fated birds painted in Arbulu inevitably evoke those that drink together of a crater or peck a cluster of grapes, common in the steles and romantic and very frequent tombst Point out The Basque researcher, who recognizes in any case that in the images of Arbulu the birds do not appear with other icons, such as drinks, so “its nature is difficult to identify” and “elusive”. Are there more meanings? Yes. In his analysis the researcher pays attention to other elements that have emerged on the Arbulu wall, such as eight radios albums. “Those wheels or radiated stars appear frequently in the discoude steles of both the Basque Country and of nearby regions,” Slide. Its meaning is also suggestive and invites you to look, rather than consecration crosses, to designs that can often be seen in medieval funeral steles. The tree figures have also led him to slide the hypothesis that they can be linked to the paintings of a historical character, Gastea de Arburu, of Gallic origin but buried in the region. But … why? The big question. Why paint a Christian temple with birds, solar disks and quadrupeds with claws, some with the appearance of wild boars? In An interview with The country López de Munain slides some theories, such as their creators wanted to represent on the walls what they saw in their most immediate environment or … Read more

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