California’s wild boar records pile up in one county more than anywhere else. Santa Clara County holds 907 of the state’s 2,114, most of them from the Diablo Range east of San Jose, where Henry W. Coe State Park and Blue Oak Ranch Reserve spread across oak savanna and chaparral. Mount Diablo State Park, farther north in Contra Costa County, adds a second cluster. These are big blocks of open land within easy reach of the Bay Area’s many naturalists, and two of the busiest sites, Blue Oak Ranch and Hastings Natural History Reserve in Monterey County, are University of California research reserves. So the lopsided pattern says as much about who’s looking as about where hogs live. Records still reach 49 counties, from Mendocino in the north to Riverside in the south.
Not a native animal
None of California’s pigs belong here. They descend from free-ranging domestic stock and from Eurasian boar turned loose for hunting in Monterey County in the 1920s, and the state counts them as an introduced species.
Acorns and dry summers
Reports peak in April with 239, ease to a summer low of 137 in June, then rise again to 201 in October. Spring is when the hills are green and soft ground is easy to dig. The fall bump lines up with acorn drop in the oak woodland, a food these animals seek out hard. Through the dry summer, hogs tend to bed down in shady creek bottoms and feed more at night, which helps explain the midyear dip.
Full species profile
