Things that go ‘oink’ in the night

For the second day in a row I ended up today totally knackered and running with sweat. Yesterday it was because of my futile attempts to bang a 1 metre long metal rod into my rocky ground but today the reason was quite different and I’ll explain why.

Yesterday I noted that from a distance there was something weird about the ground at the bottom of my land – some raised brown strips that I thought might be piles of leaves or old grass cuttings, but I thought nothing more about them as I was focused on sorting out my caravan’s water supply and fitting out my electrical box. However, when Wim arrived this morning for our usual Sunday morning coffee together he said, ‘I see that you’ve been visited by the sanglier (wild boar)’, and he was right.

A small herd (I think, from the extent of the damage and the hoof marks) had invaded my land a couple of nights ago and wreaked havoc.

As we have seen so many times before on our grass runways here, they love land on which the grass has been cut because it allows them to get to the roots so much quicker than when they have to fight their way through long, thick stems and when they do, they attack the ground with both their snouts and their hooves and cause a lot of destruction in the process. Here are some shots of what my hitherto quite level grass looked like after they had departed.

And these weren’t the worst bits. I didn’t take any more pictures because I wanted to get cracking on reinstating the ground as soon as possible, but in the centre of the largest and most severely damaged area they had dug down over six inches (15 cms) in places and tossed large divots aside for quite a distance. As we were expecting rain (it’s raining now as I type this) I wanted to start repairing the damage as soon as possible as I thought that hopefully the rain would help settle the ground down again, so I got out my trusty rake and set to the job in hand.

It took over two hours of hard work that were thoroughly exhausting and as it was sunny with a temperature of about 16 degrees C, I was soon dripping with sweat. The trouble is, the damage that the boar do is not predictable or consistent. Some of the ground can just be flipped back over again and trodden down, but not that much. The majority of the divots they create are tossed aside from the hole from whence they came so pretty soon you’re into a game of patchwork turfing.

Sure, you want to try to get the land as level as possible but you also want to replace the divots with as much grass showing upwards as possible, so you end up bent over fitting pieces back into the holes by hand like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. However, I eventually did as much as I thought I would today and although the ground really now needs rolling, it didn’t come out too badly as the following shots show.

Indeed, from further up the land near the top, you’d hardly notice any difference.

The question now, of course, is what is the memory-span of a wild boar. I went onto the land below mine and found several large holes that the boar had created before moving up onto mine where presumably the pickings were easier. My problem will be if they remember that and come straight back onto mine and do a repeat job. I’d hate to have to do what I did today all over again… 😐