The European wild boar sometimes attains a height of nearly a meter (three feet) at the shoulder and a weight of 100 kilos (220 pounds). It is built rather like a bison, the hindquarters sloping down from the shoulders. The long, hairy-tipped tail and, in the male, well-developed tusks also distinguish it from its domestic counterpart. Obviously, this is a formidable animal, as numerous boar hunters who have been treed by it or watched it cut up their dogs can attest. Normally, however, wild boars are not dangerous and run at the sight or scent of man. One evening, standing in a yard where a boar had rooted the night before, I asked a long-time boar observer about the animal’s pugnacity. “They won’t attack you unless they’re wounded or hemmed,” this observer related. “I’ve tried to get them to charge me. Even picked up a squealing piglet once, but the sow didn’t attack.” Wild boars feed mostly at night. Campers near balds in the western section of the park sometimes see them or hear their grunts and snorts as they run away. The females and young travel about in family groups but the males are loners. Though the animals are elusive, spending their days resting in dense cover, the signs of their rooting are very obvious on balds, in beech gaps and open fields, and along trails in moist woods. Wild boars move seasonally in quest of food. In spring they eat a lot of grass, as well as succulent roots and the upper parts of wildflowers, which are especially abundant in cove forests and high-elevation beech forests. In summer they continue eating grass and other herbaceous plants but also seek huckleberries, blueberries, and blackberries. When acorns, hickory nuts, beechnuts, and other tree fruits start falling, they turn their attention to these, which in abundant years can carry the boars through winter. When the mast fails they feed heavily on tubers of wild yam and the outer layer of pitch pine roots. Throughout the year they supplement this vegetable diet with whatever invertebrates, salamanders, snakes, rodents, and other small animals they can root out or catch. Carrion and garbage are always welcome, too. The wild boar, as classic an omnivore as his domestic cousin, will eat almost anything.