Wild boar make a comeback

THE way in which food has become a globally traded commodity in recent decades is truly amazing.

What prompted this thought was a visit to my local supermarket. Wandering past the chests of frozen food I noticed joints of wild boar for sale. It’s a meat I’m fond of, though I don’t get to eat it very often, so I bought a piece.

It was packed in a box and when I got home I started to read the small print on it, curious about where my boar had come from. I knew it almost certainly came from a farm, not from the wild, but was it an Irish farm? The answer was that the meat had been packaged in Germany, which is not surprising as there are lots of wild boar in Germany and it was a German supermarket, but that the ingredients had come from the USA. This was a surprise. There are species of wild and feral pigs in the Americas but the European wild boar is not one of them.

Obviously someone had exported live breeding stock from Europe to the United States where it had been reared and slaughtered for re-export to Germany where the meat had been packaged and sent on to Ireland. My joint of meat had quite a carbon footprint.

There used to be wild boar in Ireland up until quite recent times. There’s a Latin poem by an early Irish monk written in about the 6th or 7th century which shows he is obviously very familiar with them.

They probably survived in some of our forests until the late Middle Ages and what caused them to become extinct was loss of habitat when the forests were felled. Wolves, which almost certainly preyed on our wild boar, became extinct a few centuries later.

In the late 20th century our taste for exotic foods led to the re-introduction of wild boar as a farm animal in Ireland. A quick internet search will come up with several current outlets for the meat and live breeding stock in this country. What is more surprising is that they’re turning up, with increasing frequency, as wild animals roaming the countryside. Earlier this year, three small herds were discovered in three locations in Co Clare. They’re usually found in large forestry plantations.

How these animals got there is not clear. They could have escaped from boar farms or they could be abandoned pets. But it is much more likely that they were purchased with the deliberate intention of naturalising them in the forestry plantations by people who planned on returning later to hunt them.

This, of course, is illegal. It’s also rather dangerous. I’ve a friend in Germany who’s a hunter and he spent a lot of last year in hospital after being charged by a boar.

PIED WAGTAIL(Motacilla alba)

This little black, white and grey bird with a long, bobbing tail is an extremely common resident species that has adjusted well to urban and suburban life. They’re often called ‘Willie Wagtails’ and they have an odd liking for tarmac surfaces. What they find to eat on expanses of tarmac is something of a mystery. At this time of year they often roost communally. In the 20th century there were famous roosts containing thousands of birds in plane trees in O Connell Street in Dublin. But then the trees were cut down. Communal roosting probably helps the birds retain body heat in winter and there are records of it taking place in greenhouses. There is a continental race called the white wagtail; which turns up here as a passage migrant in spring and autumn. It’s not easy to distinguish these from our pied wagtails, and tboth races show considerable seasonal variation in their plumage. At the last census there were about 130,000 breeding pairs of pied wagtails in the country.