GOING FULL BOAR


‘400 years after they were exterminated in Scotland, are boar back for good?’


with Mackay, with strict orders not to shoot the lead sow (who ensures the young female boar are not tupped until they are ready), or the main male (who keeps the young male boar at bay and stops a population explosion), but to go for the two-year-old males who weigh in at around 15 stone and are plentiful and good eating. Not that this was the way it turned out.


Although the signs of boar were everywhere, we weren’t able to dispatch any thanks to two ramblers who calmly walked through the glen – at 8.30pm on a Wednesday night in mid-Febru- ary, ten miles from the nearest road! – ambling loudly across the boar feeding area, setting off the lights and kicking over the feeders. Still, I’d seen more than enough to know


that, 400 years after they were exterminated in Scotland, the boar appear to be back for good. In Germany, they are such a pest that the city of Berlin culls 2,000 feral boars each year to stop them digging up football pitches and rootling through dustbins. In Scotland’s wild places they are finding a warmer welcome, with every land- owner possessing dense and otherwise useless woodland plantation licking their lips. As, indeed, is Fraser Mackay. The Glen


Dessary keeper has taken a punt and it looks like it’s paid off handsomely. Our hills may never be quite the same again.


Left: Boar are nocturnal creatures. Above: Scotland’s boar will soon be in the hunters’ crosshairs.


WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK 105


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