Why a javelina is not a pig
The resemblance to a pig is real but shallow. Peccaries and true pigs trace back to a shared ancestor and sit in the same broad order, but they have been separate families for tens of millions of years. The differences show all over the animal. A javelina’s canine tusks are short and set vertically, the uppers pointing straight down instead of curling out and up the way a hog’s do, so the tusks hone themselves against each other every time the jaws close. Its stomach is complex and multi-chambered, closer to a deer’s than to the simple gut of a pig. It carries a scent gland on its back that no pig has. It is smaller, shorter-legged, and shorter-tailed. Its hind feet carry one fewer toe. The quickest tell in the field is build: a peccary is all shoulder and no rump, a low wedge of an animal, while a feral hog (wild boar) stands taller and runs two to four times heavier.
Recognizing one in the field
An adult javelina stands about knee-high, roughly twenty to twenty-four inches at the shoulder, and weighs between thirty-five and sixty pounds, with little difference between the sexes. The coat is coarse and bristly, a salt-and-pepper grizzle of black and gray that reads as nearly uniform from a distance. The name comes from a band of paler hair that crosses the shoulders like a loosely worn collar, clearest in good light and easily lost on a dusty or wet animal. Newborns break the pattern, arriving a tawny reddish-brown that darkens to the adult grizzle over the first months. Up close the head is mostly snout, a long mobile nose that ends in a flat disc. The tail is so short and buried in the rump bristles that most people never register it at all.
Where javelinas live
The javelina’s United States stronghold is the hot, dry country of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and the semidesert grasslands and oak-juniper foothills that fringe them. It wants terrain with cover and steady food: prickly-pear flats, mesquite bosques along dry washes, brushy canyon bottoms. The ragged edges where desert gives way to rangeland. Most animals live in the warm lowlands, but the species climbs into the foothills of the sky-island mountains where oak and juniper take hold, thinning out as the elevation and the cold rise. Farther south the same peccary occupies a far wider set of homes, from tropical dry forest to rainforest, which is why a javelina in a Costa Rican jungle and one in an Arizona arroyo are one species living in two very different worlds.
Life in the squadron
Javelinas are intensely social, and a lone one is almost always a temporary situation. They live in mixed herds, called sounders or, in the Southwest, squadrons, that usually number six to nine animals but can swell toward fifty where food is rich. A herd holds adults of both sexes, subadults. Young of the year. It feeds, beds, and defends itself as a single unit. Rank runs on age and body size, the largest animals dominant, and on cold desert nights the group beds down in a shared pile for warmth. Their talk is close-range and constant: a low grunting keeps the sounder in contact while it feeds, a rapid clatter of the teeth warns off a rival, and a sharp bark or a woofing, foot-stamping display signals alarm. Startle a sounder and the animals tend to bunch and face outward together, the behavior most often misread as a charge.
The scent that binds a herd
The gland on a javelina’s back is what holds the herd together. It is usually what gives the animals away before they are seen. Set on the midline a few inches ahead of the tail, it oozes a musky, oily secretion that the peccaries rub onto rocks, stumps, and one another, working hip against head until every member of a sounder carries the same shared smell. That common odor is how a herd knows its own and how it stays together in brush too thick for sight to help. To a person the scent is strong and skunk-like, and a warm draft of it on the desert air, or a sudden burst when an animal is alarmed, is often the first sign that javelinas are near. No pig produces anything like it, which makes the gland both a field mark and a good part of why peccaries were given a family of their own.
A diet built around cactus
For all the tusks, the javelina is mostly a plant-eater. The plant at the center of its life is the prickly pear. It strips and chews the spiny pads with a tough muzzle and heavy grinding molars, taking in food and, just as important, water. In country where open water can disappear for months, the moisture stored in cactus carries a herd through the dry season. Agave hearts, mesquite beans, roots, tubers, bulbs, fruit, seeds, and green vegetation fill out the menu, and when the mesquite pods drop in late summer the sounders gather along the washes to feed. It isn’t a purist, though. Given the chance a javelina takes insects, grubs, bird eggs. The odd small vertebrate, which lands it squarely among the omnivores even though the great bulk of what it eats has roots.
Breeding through the year
Unlike most mammals of its latitude, the javelina keeps no fixed breeding season across much of its range. In the mild Southwest, and wherever food is dependable, a female can conceive at almost any time of year and may raise two litters in twelve months. Gestation runs close to five months, long for an animal this size. The litter is small, usually two, now and then one or as many as four. The young are precocial, born furred and up on their feet within hours, which suits a mother who must keep pace with a moving herd rather than guard a den. They nurse for a couple of months and are largely on their own before their first year is out. Early life is dangerous: many young are lost to abandonment, to squabbles inside the herd, and to predators. Adults have few natural enemies, but mountain lions, coyotes, and bobcats take the young, jaguars still do along the Mexican border, and loose dogs kill their share near towns. Survivors can reach seven or eight years in the wild, and captives have lived past thirty.
Javelinas and people
As a species the collared peccary is in no trouble. The IUCN rates it Least Concern across its enormous range, and while it sits on CITES Appendix II to keep watch on international trade, the United States and Mexican populations are specifically excluded from that listing. Through much of Latin America it is hunted for meat under local and managed harvests, and in the United States the three range states manage it as a game animal with regulated seasons. The bigger story north of the border is how easily the javelina has settled in alongside people. It turns up on golf courses, in city parks and dry washes, and in the yards of desert suburbs from Tucson and Phoenix to towns across south Texas, pulled in by irrigated plantings, fallen fruit, ornamental cactus, and unsecured pet food. Most conflict is about gardens and garbage. It fades where those easy meals are taken away. The animals see poorly, move as a group, and treat loose dogs as predators rather than company, so trouble usually comes from a startled sounder rather than a bold one. Traffic takes a steady toll wherever desert highways cross their range, an under-counted cause of javelina deaths across the Southwest.
