wild boar
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Learning from wild boar
On 9 April 2015, I got to participate in a workshop on the potential opportunities and costs of reintroducing wild forest reindeer to Sweden. When Stig-Olof Holm publicly proposed bringing back the forest reindeer about a year ago, I was cynical to the idea. So when I was invited to talk about historical reintroductions in Sweden at a stakeholder workshop, I was both interested in sharing my historical viewpoint and hearing how others thought about proposed reintroduction. Rather than talk about forest reindeer (which I actually know very little about), my presentation focused on historical reintroductions in Sweden. It included a section on the wild boar. Wild boar was originally…
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Short-term thinking
The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten ran a feature article a couple of weeks ago about alien species with the dramatic, quantitative headline: “2320 nye arter har kommit til Norge — halvparten er uønsket” (2320 new species have come to Norway — half are unwanted). Because the huge image at the top featured a muskox, it caught my eye. The article doesn’t really say much new. It covers the definition of “fremmed art” (alien species), which is defined according to the Norwegian Natural Biodiversity Law (Naturmangfoldloven NOU 2004: 28) as “en organisme som ikke hører til noen art eller bestand som forekommer naturlig på stedet” (an organism which does not belong to a…
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A mixed population
Today I taught an advanced undergraduate class on Ecosystem Management here at UmU and gave a lecture on reintroduction then led a discussion section. The discussion centered on Martin Goulding’s “Native or Alien? The Case of the Wild Boar in Britain,” which is one of the bright spots in the Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals: Human Perceptions, Attitudes and Approaches to Management edited collection that I criticised in a previous post. In our discussion, one of the students commented on how strange it was that the wild boar were seen as aliens and rejected when they were thought to be hybrid animals (wild boar crossed with domestic pig) but after genetic…
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Wild boar woes
The wild boar is rooting up trouble in Norway, according to a recent article on ScienceNordic. In February 2013, for the first time in thousands of years, a wild boar was killed in Norway. Wild boar were last roaming about the Norwegian countryside in the Stone Ages, 5000+ years ago, when they were used as a food source according to archeological finds near Stavanger. Sweden has a similar history of free-range wild boar — evidence points to them dying out 4000 years ago — but wild boar are also known to have survived in Sweden well into the 17th century in royal hunting parks. Needless to say, they were gone from…
