By: Mark Tyson, M.S.
Photos By: Blake Alldredge, Dr. Billy Higginbotham and Jared
Timmons
Keeping an “eye” on
feral hogs
One of the most important things to
remember when you experience feral hog damage is to not place your trap
directly where you experienced the damage. Doing this will force you to compete with a
proven food resource and will reduce your trapping success. Ideally you will want to track the hogs back
to where they are accessing the damaged area, most likely leading you to a
trail that the hogs use to access their daytime resting areas. Placing your trap near this trail will serve
to intercept the hogs on their way to feed.
You will have a much better
chance at getting them on bait this way.
Game Camera Installation
When tracking hogs to their daytime
cover the old adage “work smarter not harder” now comes into play. You may not be able to find the trail that the
hogs are using or you may find multiple trails and not know which one to
follow. Thanks to some relatively new
technology you can easily learn how the hogs are accessing the damaged area. Game cameras now come equipped with a time
lapse photography option, where they can be set to “scout” an area over an
extended period of time. These cameras
can be set to capture an image every one, five or ten seconds and then using
the provided software these images are converted into a video that can playback
an entire day’s worth of images in a few minutes. These cameras can also capture motion activated
images, functioning as traditional game camera would. Some models offer the option to record at
night but their effective range is reduced to the limitations of the model’s
infrared illumination capabilities. Since
you are attempting to locate the hog’s daytime cover the limitations imposed on
nighttime recording should not be a problem.
Now that you have located the trail
used by hogs to access their feeding areas you will want to begin the trapping
process by pre-baiting and conditioning them to the trap site. You can find out
how to accomplish this in my blog article “Pre-baiting
and Conditioning Feral Hogs for Trapping” on the Wild Wonderings Blog. Once
you have accomplished the pre-baiting and conditioning process as described in
the article you are ready to introduce your trap and begin the trapping
process.
High Selectivity
Trapping Without Tripwire Uncertainty
With the game camera images
you acquired during the pre-baiting and conditioning phase of trapping you will
be able to determine how big to build your trap. I suggest using a corral style
trap as it will give you the best capture rate for the trapping effort put
forth. Dan Gaskins addressed the benefits of using a corral trap over a box
trap in his blog article entitled “Economics
of Trapping Feral Hogs: Box Traps Vs. Corral Traps”.
Williams et al. (2011) suggested that “corral traps are temporally and
economically superior to box traps with respect to efficiency; that is, corral
traps effectively trap more pigs per trap night at a lower cost per pig than do
box traps.” Corral traps are commonly built from four to
six 16 foot long utility panels with 4 in. X 4 in. squares, but you will want
to tailor the size of your trap to the number of hogs you have responding to
bait. You can learn how to build a corral trap by watching the video below.
When
selecting a gate for your corral trap you have a variety of choices: saloon
doors, rooter gates, guillotine gates, side swing gates and several others.
Being focused on effective and efficient trapping, I have an opinion on which
style of trap gate is best for a corral trap. You can find out what that is by
reading my blog article entitled “The
Best Choice for a Corral Trap Gate”.
Guillotine Style Drop Gate with Feral Hogs Nearby
Now let’s apply the benefit of technology
to this style of corral trap gate. There are currently a few companies out
there that have harnessed the power of wireless technology to allow a corral
trap gate to be closed using an offsite computer or cellular device. These
wireless systems incorporate the use of a remotely monitored camera which
alerts the user that hogs have entered the trap. With the pictures provided by
the remote camera the user can determine if all of the hogs known to use the
bait site have entered the trap. Once the determination has been made that all
hogs are inside the trap the user can remotely trigger the trap door to close.
The ability of a human to determine when to trigger the trap can be a major
advantage over the much more indiscriminate manually activated trip wire. When
using a manual trip wire measures can be taken in both trap construction and
bait placement to ensure the entire sounder has the opportunity to enter the
trap before it is triggered. When using remotely triggered gates the user will
need to be available 24/7 as the hogs typically do not follow our typical
day/night routine.
Feral Hogs Approaching a Corral Trap
With Technology Comes a Price
While there is a higher cost
associated with remotely triggered gates, their human influenced selectivity
shows promise in effectively removing feral hogs from the landscape. A recent
United States Department of Agriculture, Animal Plant Health Inspection Service
(USDA
APHIS) presentation associated with the Feral Swine Environmental Impact
Statement (EIS) Meeting suggested that “the total aggregate cost of damage
caused by feral hogs is estimated to be $1.5 billion annually, with at least
$800 million of this estimate related to direct costs to agriculture.”
According to the USDA APHIS publication “Feral
Swine: Damage and Disease Threats” there
are at least 5 million feral hogs in the United States. By dividing $1.5
billion in annual damage by 5 million estimated hogs you find that each hog is
estimated to inflict $300 in damage annually. Based on this estimate each hog
removed reflects a savings of $300 conversely each feral hog not captured will
continue to cause damage valued at this same figure. Each sow has the potential
to inflate this damage estimate by $2400 annually as they typically have 1.5
liters per year producing an average of 5.6 piglets per litter (Timmons
et al. 2012).
Research Needs
Research is needed to compare the
effectiveness of remotely triggered gates to that of tripwire triggered gates.
If research suggests that remotely triggered gates are more effective in
capturing feral hogs the cost/benefit ratio can then be estimated. This
evaluation would be a great contribution to feral hog management and to our
environment as a whole!
The hyper-linked resource document below will provide you with quick access to many of our online feral hog resources including publications, fact sheets and videos.
For free educational
programming or technical assistance with feral hogs please contact us:
Mark Tyson,
South and Southeast Texas, 979-845-4698, mark.tyson@ag.tamu.edu
Dan Gaskins,
Central and North Central Texas, 254-248-0532, dan.gaskins@tamu.edu
The hyper-linked resource document below will provide you with quick access to many of our online feral hog resources including publications, fact sheets and videos.
Our services
are provided free of charge through a Clean Water Act 319(h) non-point sources
grant from the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board and the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency
Literature Cited
Timmons, J.
B., J. Mellish, B. Higginbotham, J. Griffin, R. Lopez, A. Sumrall, J. C. Cathey
and K. Skow.
2012. Feral Hog Population Growth, Density and
Harvest in Texas. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, College Station,
Texas, USA.
United
States Department of Agriculture, Animal Plant Health Inspection Service [USDA
APHIS]. 2011.
Feral swine: damage and disease
threats. < http://www.aphis.usda.gov/publications/ wildlife_damage/content/printable_version/feral_swine.pdf>.
Accessed 8 August 2013.
United
States Department of Agriculture, Animal Plant Health Inspection Service [USDA
APHIS]. 2013.
Slideshow: Feral swine in the United
States. APHIS Feral Swine EIS Meeting. Accessed
3 May 2013.
Williams, B.
L., R. W. Holtfreter, S. S. Ditchkoff and J. B. Grand. 2011.
Trap style influences wild
pig behavior and trapping success. Journal of
Wildlife Management 75:432-436.
