It’s an image that only hunters in Greece used to witness, and then only for those willing to trek into more rugged and remote terrain, yet in recent years what’s believed to be a population explosion for one of the largest wild animals in the country has led to sightings even on the edges of large urban areas.
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A short video posted on the Instagram page of the Athens daily “Ta Nea” on Monday shows a family of European wild boars (Sus scrofa scrofa), two adults, and a sounder of piglets roaming through a street of the Thrakomakedones district, in the forested foothills beneath imposing Mt. Parnitha, overlooking the greater Athens area from the northwest.
Instances of wild boars and feral pigs are now an almost ubiquitous sight in much of the country’s rural provinces, with road accidents now reported. Of late, however, such sightings have been documented along the more forested hills and mountains surrounding cities.
Another phenomenon that is drawing the attention of researchers is the crossbreeding of wild boars with pigs, known as a “boar–pig hybrid”, similar to the well-documented feral hog hybrids in North America.
