Suidae

Some of my posts are intentional captures; I know ahead of time that what I’m about to do might make it here, and I plan accordingly. Take some photos, even. This is not one of those posts. You get what you get.

Both of my siblings moved to California years ago, initially to San Francisco before settling in Oakland. On visits there I’ve been struck by the landscape. Leave the city (even to some of the larger urban parks) and you’re in high-relief chapparal; steep-sided ridges and draws of mixed grassland and stands of bay laurel and oak. Blacktail deer. Ensatinas. Bobcats. Rattlesnakes. Black widows. Puffballs. Newts that'll kill you. It’s fun stuff to explore.

City park puffballs.

Yellow-eyed ensatinas; the Bay Area form of this ring species.

Watch your fingers.

An evolutionary arms race with garter snake predators means California newts are positively brimming with tetrodotoxin.

A couple of years ago, my brother Eliot, his wife and another couple went in together on a rural property just outside Oakland. The place is pretty impressive. A former horse boarding operation at the dead end of a winding canyon road, there’s a valley floor level with a couple of houses and sprawling, ramshackle sheds, barns, and stables. The bulk of the property, though, is undeveloped, and climbs upward as a sharp spine to the high hills of the adjacent wilderness preserve. Steep gulleys fall away on both sides of the spine, with that same mosaic of grassland and oak/laurel forest. All 20 minutes from Eliot's Oakland place.

Not long after getting the property, Eliot came to me for advice on an unexpected problem; feral pigs. Remarkably bold, they’d been showing up near the houses and proven difficult to run off. Dogs had been chased (and one injured in a pig fight). Anything like a garden would quickly succumb to the pigs’ incredible rooting ability. But wait – aren’t these also a potential resource? Eliot – never a hunter – had questions.

Homestead hog.

And I had answers. Sort of. For me, pigs are about as unfamiliar as you can get and still have hooves. Research ensued; how do you hunt pigs? After navigating California hunting regulations and firearms legislation, I walked Eliot through the steps of buying a .270, and he picked up a landowners wild pig depredation permit. The permit extends pig control options beyond the standard hunting regs to things like nighttime hunting with spotlights and trapping. And, with Christmas holidays approaching, I booked a flight to SFO.

The majority of my visit was enjoyable family time (including with 1-year-old niece), but I’ll focus here on the SS&S-relevant content.

Mornings would start in the early dark; the two of us drinking coffee in the van, headlights sweeping the winding narrow road out to Eliot’s place. Arriving and setting up quietly in damp black air full of rising birdsong, senses already sharpened with the internal hum of anticipation. A feeling long familiar to me, I wondered how new (or how similar) this felt for him.

We’d start at the valley bottom level, slowly and cautiously working our way upward through gulleys and ridges to the top of the spine as day broke. Peering into thickets, peeking over ridgetops. This was also Eliot’s first chance to explore the further corners of the new place. We saw deer every day, often bumping them out of the brush just tens of meters away. California quail. Rabbits. A huge skunk. Pre-European live oaks the diameter of coffee tables. A towering grandfather madrone with contorted red bark. The enormous seeds of California buckeye trees. Meandering split pole fences sinking back into the ground. No pigs. Well, we did bust a small noisy group in an impenetrable poison-oak patch in the too-dark of an early morning, but saw none.

Sweat-inducing terrain.

There was a complete disconnect between pig sign and pigs, though. Every morning would see vast tracts of newly-rooted soil, turned over as by shallow-tilling machinery. Tracks everywhere, of all sizes. They were there. Just not in a way we could figure out in the daylight.

We did not, however, put all of our eggs in one basket. Eliot’s permit encompassed trapping, and I’d put a lot of time into learning how to build and operate pig traps. We built a rectangular pen using old fencing panels lying around the property, with a heavy door that dropped and locked closed. The door was held open by a cord attached to a horizontal trigger stick, held by upward tension in notches in two other vertical sticks pounded into the ground at the back of the trap. We scattered bait (fermented corn) around the trap, with a heavy trail of it leading to a pile just underneath the horizontal trigger stick. A rooting pig knocks the stick free, and the door drops. Close enough to Eliot’s house for wifi, he installed a motion-detecting camera that broadcast a live feed to our phones.

Frame complete.

Finished and in situ (dump truck for scale).

On camera.

Our setup did not work. By the sign, pigs would mill around the area most nights, but never quite enter the trap. We’d get intermittent nighttime alerts from the camera, but video recordings showed nothing. Maybe this pig thing was beyond me.

Nearly a week into trapping, I went down to check the trap without first remotely disabling the camera. Turns out the ‘alarm’ setting was on – walking close to the pen tripped a twittering klaxon from the camera. So we switched that feature off.

Despite this blip of hope, I wasn’t feeling confident with two days left in my visit. The camera, though, was a novel and captivating feature – I’d never used something like it – and I often found myself logging in just to watch the empty trap. That's what I was doing after a family supper back in Oakland when the camera showed two pigs feeding in the trap.

Somehow the motion sensor hadn’t triggered a phone alert – I’d just stumbled upon this. The pigs were contentedly eating corn at the trigger stick, but hadn’t yet set it off – the trap door was open. Everyone huddled around my phone as one of them finally dislodged the stick and the door dropped.

We drove out to the land with our assembled gear. In the trap were the two pigs, which we’d later weigh at 50 and 70lbs. We dispatched them with head shots (though turns out a scoped .270 isn’t the tool for <5m shots – an iron-sighted .22 would be ideal).

Continuing the theme of unfamiliar circumstances, we had electric light, running water, a pressure washer and a forklift at hand for skinning and gutting. We laid the pigs out on the concrete apron of a barn, gave them a high-pressure washdown, and raised them up from the forklift’s tines for processing.

I’d spent a lot of time watching pig skinning and gutting videos – of the many ways they’re not like deer, this is a notable one. Deer pellets and gut contents are something to be avoided while processing, but incidental contact with meat is addressable. Not so with pigs – scavenging omnivores with guts to match, you don’t want any contamination. They’re not quite built the same as deer, either. I’d also never gutted an animal from a hanging position. The only one who’d ever done anything remotely like this, here I was, in the literal spotlight. All to say, I proceeded very cautiously, with the intent of talking everyone through what I was doing.

The end result, though, was near perfect – very cleanly skinned, and guts and organs dropped bloodless and intact into a waiting tub. Carcasses cool, clean and dry until morning. If you can get it, I recommend the forklift/floodlight/pressure washer combo.

Recommended hunting purchase.

The next day Eliot and I broke the carcasses down into portions – hams, shoulders, loins, ribs and stew meat – and I had just enough time for a celebratory tacos de carnitas dinner with the family before my early morning flight home.

A green-world break from Whitehorse winter. An unfamiliar animal in a whole new landscape. Incentive to learn new things. An opportunity to connect with my brother and share accumulated knowledge in a very unexpected setting. Tacos. I’d do this again.