Today I was introduced to a most interesting way of keeping wild boar away from farmer’s crops. Hair. Human hair supposedly smells awful to Wild Sau and keeps them away anywhere from two weeks to a whole month, depending on how much it rains. Our natural smell as well as the perfumes found in the shampoos we used is enough to ward off these omnivores that are causing so much havoc over here. So I found myself feeling most peculiar this week as I walked around the edges of fields, throwing out clumps of hair every few feet. Herr Brecht assures me it works for short periods of time and is a lot less time consuming than setting up fences everywhere but I am skeptical. He’s been doing this for a long time though and hasn’t been wrong as long as I have been here.
My experiment with tracking the wild boar population via wild game clock, or Wild Uhr, can now continue. There are a few times in life that you hope your suspicions are wrong and this was one of those times. As I wrote in my last blog we believed all three clocks where stolen by curious visitors that stumbled upon them while hiking through. Together in a group we combed the areas surrounding the original locations of the wild game clocks that get set off when they are knocked over by pigs digging through the ground for food. A good half an hour search at each location yielded all three clocks found by the eagle eyes of Herr Brecht. They had sharp teeth marks in them and it is Herr Brecht’s believe that some young curious pigs carried off the clocks with the corn scent still on it thinking it was some type of food. They where a good 30 meters or more away and tucked away under some bushes and I am sure I would have never found them on my own. I am now logging the times these clocks are “hit” by pigs and am then going to try to do some analysis to see what seats should yield us the best results for wild boar.
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