Tennessee’s best-known hogs live in the Great Smoky Mountains. The national park holds 21 records, more than any other named place in the state, drawn from Blount and Sevier counties on the Tennessee side of the range. That population has an unusual pedigree: it carries blood from European wild boar stocked on a hunting preserve in the North Carolina mountains early in the 1900s, animals that escaped and worked their way across the high ridges.
The Cumberland Plateau leads
The county at the top of the list isn’t in the Smokies at all. Morgan County has 54 of the state’s 141 records, far ahead of Blount’s 14, and Frozen Head State Park inside it accounts for only 5. Most Morgan County reports come from plateau woods outside the named parks. Farther west, Stewart County and Land Between the Lakes, with 9 records, form a third pocket between the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. White County, on the plateau’s western edge, adds a dozen. In all, records reach 27 counties.
Hogs are introduced in Tennessee. NatureServe lists a conservation rank as not applicable, since they’re no part of the state’s native fauna.
Reports peak in April at 24, with March and June close behind and May oddly quiet. With so few records in any month, that jagged shape says more about when a few observers happened to be out than about the hogs, which stay active all year.
Full species profile
