(From “Diaries...) Pigs Are Pigs Mar 11: The watershed of the part of the river I am traversing today has been damaged by wild pigs. Pigs are not, of course, native to our landscape. Nevertheless, they have become locally quite abundant along the coast and elsewhere. In places, they now number in the hundreds, often making them the most common large mammal–outnumbering even our ubiquitous and native deer. I don’t see or hear them, but their presence is unmistakable: numerous areas, some quite large, which appear to have been mechanically rototilled. This is where they’ve used their snouts and hooves to tear up the substrate looking for food. Several of the uprooted areas in and along the streambed are oozing muddy sedimenttrails directly into the nearby stream. These mini-mud-flows will expand and worsen with the next heavy rainfall. But today, another critter–this one purely a native–also draws my attention. There are thousands of them, each one slowly squirming and displaying its bright orange belly. These are rough-skin newts–a kind of salamander, reclusive and widely dispersed in damp places for most of the year. But spring is their breeding time too. Just like their brethren the steelhead with which they share the stream, they’re moving in mass to favored breeding pools along the stream. Rough-skins secrete a powerful neurotoxin that can quickly kill a dog or cat that mouths them. I can’t help but hope these red little babies are what the pigs are rooting after. What a nice payback that would be! But then, I’ve never seen any dead pigs lying around down here–at least none without bullet holes through them. So I dismiss the thought as wishful thinking. I climb back into my little boat and start stroking down river, hoping to see less pig-damaged terrain soon.