Swamp Thing

John Imhoff slammed the truck door and proceeded to load his 12-gauge with buckshot. "OK, let's go," he said. Safety precautions at the 10,000-acre Deerfield Plantation near St. George, South Carolina, precluded me from carrying a gun as Imhoff and I headed into the thick swamp after my hog. Only the guides carry firearms when tracking wounded game. Over the years, I've tracked many animals after dark. But this was the first time I felt uneasy.

I shot the big boar in the waning light on an early March hunt, and it was completely dark by the time Imhoff and I set off to track it with only flashlights through the maze of greenbriers and scrub pines. A day earlier, Deerfield's Hugh Walters told me a wounded boar is one of the nastiest critters on Earth. It's a powerful animal that will charge its pursuers in an attempt to knock them down and cut them with their elongated, sharp tusks--a boar's deadliest defense against predators.

Imhoff had tracked many hogs after dark during his three years as a Deerfield guide, and had been charged several times but never knocked down. That made me feel a bit easier as we picked our way through the swamp. Still, I thought, there's a first time for everything.

The wild hog is tough, intelligent, and is fast becoming a favorite quarry among hunters in the South. From mid-January through early March, hunters from all over the U.S. flock to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to hunt them. Hogs are hunted year round in these states, but the dead of winter, after deer season, is prime time.

In each of these three states, hogs are considered a nonnative, invasive species. "We have no regulations to protect hogs because it's not our mission to protect them," said Scott Frazier, Georgia DNR wildlife biologist. "Our mission is to protect native wildlife."

Since true wild hogs are native only to parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, it's believed the animals were introduced to the South by its earliest settlers; possibly as early as the mid-1500s by Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto. A common practice among the South's settlers was to release hogs into the woods and swamps to fatten them up on natural vegetation and round them up later for butchering. Naturally, not all were recaptured, and hogs breed readily.

Originally, two basic strains of hogs were turned loose in the South: the European or Russian boar, with its long, coarse black hair and elongated head, and multicolored domestic pigs that tend to have a more round head. Today, wildlife biologists believe the hogs that run wild in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida are a mix of both strains, and all are considered feral, no matter which type they resemble.

In these states wild hogs are generally found in great abundance in thick, inhospitable swampy areas adjacent to rivers or large creeks. In South Carolina, that's in the east, along the Santee and Pee Dee rivers, and in the southwest along the Savannah River. Georgia hogs are concentrated on the south side of the Savannah and farther south near the Altamaha River. Florida biologists report the greatest concentrations on large tracts of private property north and west of Lake Okeechobee.

While they thrive in the lowlands, hogs have "moved" to higher elevations in the South during the past ten to fifteen years. "Hogs are very adaptable. Now we have decent hog densities in areas where we never used to have them," said South Carolina DNR supervisor Charles Ruth. Because hogs are destructive to agriculture and compete with deer, turkeys and other native wildlife for food, South Carolina outlawed trapping and transferring them last year.