Wild boar

Where does the wild boar live?

Home: Deciduous and mixed forests across Europe and Asia.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Russia, China, Morocco.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown: 140–160 cm long. It weighs about 90 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.

The story behind it

Wild boar piglets do not look like their parents at all. A grown boar is dark brown to almost black, but the young are rusty brown with pale stripes running the length of the body, which is why German calls them Frischlinge and English simply striped piglets. Lying in the leaf litter of a wood, those stripes do what a fawn's spots do: they break up the outline so completely that a shape a metre away stops looking like an animal. The pattern is not kept for long. It fades at around three months, and by eight months the piglet wears the plain dark coat of an adult — the camouflage lasts exactly as long as the piglet is too small to defend itself. Sows raise their young together in groups, and a sow with piglets is one of the few animals in a European forest that will genuinely stand its ground.

Find it on the globe

Wild boar is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.