Winter habitat selection by wild boar Sus scrofa in southeastern Poland

Abstract

Research was conducted on habitat selection by the wild-boar population in the Carpathian foothills, southeastern Poland. In two forest districts (Bircza and Krasiczyn) with a total area of forests of 47,000 ha, 21 line transects were designated (total length, 284 km). In February 2001, tracks that wild boar left during the day were counted on five subsequent days. Using a car mileage meter and forest maps, the locations of tracks in seven forest types, forest meadows and agricultural fields situated inside the forests were determined. The Bailey's test was applied to calculate the boars' preference for each forest type and non-forest areas. Spatial distribution of 284 wildboar tracks shows that the animals do indeed prefer European beech-hornbeam Fagus silvatica-Carpinus betulus forest and avoid silver fir Abies alba forest. The hypothesis raised is that in the European beech-hornbeam forests, there are foraging areas and bedding sites crucial for the animals.

Habitat use and spatial patterns of wild boar Sus scrofa (L.): agricultural fields and edges

“…It is interesting to see that the wild boar seems not to prefer the deciduous forest over the coniferous forest during winter. The opposite pattern was shown in Poland (Fonseca 2008).…”

“…The similarity in patterns of habitat use suggest their use as cover (open areas and coniferous forest) and the probable fooddependent shift from preference of deciduous forest (Fonseca 2008) to coniferous forest. This leads us to conclude that active damage prevention like hunting on agricultural fields should take place during this time of year.…”

An assessment of the applicability of dung count to estimate the wild boar population density in a forest environment

“…For example, Gerard et al (1991), Lemel et al (2003) or Keuling et al (2008) reported that during daylight wild boars usually seek shelter and rest in young dense stands. According to Fonseca (2008), during the winter in southeastern Poland, wild boar stayed mainly in beech-hornbeam stands where they had the opportunity to feed on the beech-mast crop. Thurfjell et al (2009) confirmed that young boars prefer young coniferous stands to broadleaved stands in winter in conditions very similar to our study area, including intensive additional feeding except in a seed year.…”

Estimating wild boar (Sus scrofa) abundance and density using capture–resights in Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

“…Wild boar populations have dramatically increased across Europe during the last decades (Sàez-Royuela and Telleria 1986;Boitani et al 1995a;Schley et al 1998;Fonseca et al 2004;Klein et al 2004;Geisser and Reyer 2005). As a consequence, crop damage is a growing problem, bringing concerns with respect to the control of boar numbers.…”