Where the wild things are

There are plenty of wild things on the move, making their way into places like, say, New England. Even alligators are on heading north. Fortunately, by the time they arrive, I'll likely be gone, so I really don't need to worry about the alligator jaws of death snapping at my ankles and dragging me into the Charles River.

Urban and close-in suburban areas in Massachusetts are increasingly where the wild things are. Hostile and aggressive wild turkeys are attacking people all over Boston and its environs. Coyotes have been spotted in my neighborhood. Black bears are becoming commonplace in suburban backyards. Moose lumber down the streets. 

Joro spiders the size of your palm! Colorful spotted lanternflies! Here. They. Come.

Nobody actually saw the deed, but one theory on how the dead rat ended up in the second floor balcony is that a hawk spied a tastier option and dropped it there. 

Thanks to global warming, Canada geese are, unfortunately, not on the move. Why fly south for the season when you can spend a pleasant enough winter in Boston without having to bother to get into a V formation and exert yourself to fly south? They're here, they're everywhere, get used to it. And they're crapping everywhere. It seems to me that they manage to crap their weight each and every day, covering my preferred walking routes along the Esplanade and in the Public Garden.

While they're not the nasty aggressors that wild turkeys are,  last summer one hissed at me as I walked by. 

I will say that I felt a little foolish telling a goose to fuck the fuck off. Nevertheless, I persisted. 

And now this:

A special breed of hybrid super pigs from Canada have started to travel south into the northern United States.

The pigs pose a threat to native wildlife and may prove tough to eradicate. (Source: Prevention)

These super pigs are a human creation. Farmers crossbred domestic pigs with wild boars in order to develop a breed that would be better able to withstand Canada's winter cold. Then the market price dropped, and some farmers decided to let their super pigs go free. 

And now they're heading south, invading the US through our northern border. So far, New England is blessedly not in their sights. But they're on their way to Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan. 

And it's hard to get rid of these suckers.

“That they can survive in such a cold climate is one of the big surprises of this issue,” Ryan Brook, leader of the University of Saskatchewan’s Canadian Wild Pig Research Project, tells Field and Stream.

The cold-hardiness of the hybrid pigs means they survive well. That means other native species don’t. Brook elaborates:

“Wild hogs feed on anything. They gobble up tons and tons of goslings and ducklings in the spring."

They can "gobble up tons and tons of goslings" you say? Make way for super pigs. 

Unfortunately, super pigs also wreak havoc on crops. And they're wily enough to avoid hunters. They adjust to the presence of hunters by switching to a nocturnal lifestyle. The groups they travel in break up, and/or they change the patterns of where they hang out, so hunters have a more difficult time locating them. 

The best strategy at reigning in the super pigs has been employing the Judas Pig concept, which straps a GPS collar onto a pig to lead game officials to other pigs. Deception may be our only hope.

Pigs are plenty smart. Maybe even super smart. So maybe they'll figure out the Judas Pig thing. 

Anyway, since I don't need to worry about their destroying any crops, I'd be fine if they came to Boston and took on the Canada geese. I'm guessing they'd be smart enough not to crap on my sidewalks.