Where the Wild Things Are: Your Backyard
first, Don Kliem liked the new visitors to his town.
“But then they got very bold,” Mr. Kliem, 81, told The Times. “They would knock on the door — peck on it to get our attention.”
Wild turkeys have invaded Toms River, near New Jersey’s Atlantic coast, leaving residents furious and officials befuddled.
“They’re kind of like don’tmess-with-me birds,” said Vincent Landolfi Jr., 61, as dozens of turkeys surrounded his Toms River home.
But it is illegal for animal control officers to interfere with the turkeys unless they are sick or injured. The state has resorted to luring them with corn, capturing them with nets and relocating them. The lucky ones will live out the rest of their lives at an animal sanctuary in rural New York.
People brought the problem on themselves. By the mid-1800s, wild turkeys had disappeared from New Jersey. Then in 1977, biologists reintroduced 22 of them. Today, the state has an estimated 20,000 to 23,000 wild turkeys.
People are also behind another, more threatening, animal infestation. Over the past three decades, humans have helped feral hogs expand their territory to 38 states from 17 states, The Times reported.
“It’s not natural dispersion,” Dale Nolte, manager of the feral swine program at the United States Department of Agriculture, told The Times. “They are being moved in the backs of pickup trucks and released to create hunting opportunities.”
Although turkeys are largely harmless, feral hogs can devastate ecosystems, ruin crops and terrorize communities. The animals cause an estimated $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion in damage annually, and they can act aggressively toward people. In November, a herd of feral hogs attacked and killed a woman in Texas as she arrived at the home of an older couple for whom she worked.
The pigs are normally found in the southern United States, but Canadian pigs are now threatening as well.
Imported to Canada as livestock or for hunting in the 1980s and 1990s, the pigs escaped or were released, and their descendants have spread across the country.
Some of the pigs have adapted to the cold by developing thick coats of fur, while others have learned to burrow into the snow, creating socalled pigloos, for insulation.
Agencies in the United States are monitoring the border, wary that the pigs will expand their territory southward. “Should the pigs advance, wildlife officials plan an air assault, hunting the pigs from planes with high-tech equipment like night-vision goggles and thermal-imaging scopes,” Jim Robbins wrote in The Times.
As officials prepare to go to war with wild pigs, animal advocates are developing programs to reach creatures that have been injured by humans or have had their ecosystems destroyed by development.
Robert Jones helped found Wildlife Resources and Education Network. Animal hospitals with few resources use the service to connect with volunteers in rural areas who will track down, collect and transport injured animals to their facilities for treatment.
The transporters “are Mother Nature’s unpaid Uber drivers,” The Times’s Gray Chapman wrote, traveling long distances to deliver animals to safety.
But even Mr. Jones knows there are limits to how much humans can, and should, do.
“Sometimes letting wild be wild is the right thing to do,” he said. “You teach people what situations need our intervention, and what situations don’t.”