This being another episode in the acorn saga.
The slightly adapted summary of the paper at reference 1 starts:
Authors report results emerging from analysis of the contents of the stomachs of 96 wild boars hunted down in Sardinia, 2001–2005, during the season for both hunting and acorns, which runs from November to January.
The stomachs varied in size from around 1,000cc to 2,000cc and, on average, they were about half full.
The analysis appeared to consist of poking around for identifiable fragments, animal or vegetable. In the event remains of 11 animal and 19 vegetable species were found, stomachs were scored according to their presence or absence and the results presented as the pie charts snapped above.
Doing more looks difficult. One might, for example, boil the stuff up and derive the concentration of particular chemicals, but that would probably not serve to identify many species. In any event, that was not what was done.
But the authors do report that the diet appeared to be predominantly vegetable, without backing that appearance with numbers – this despite the presence of sheep (Ovis aries) in perhaps thirteen of the stomachs.
We don’t know whether these sheep were young or old, taken dead or alive, but presumably the local farmers have mixed feelings about wild boars. I do remember from childhood story books that wild boars were regarded as dangerous animals, the hunting of which required both skill and courage. And you had a cross piece on your boar spear to stop the animals charging right up the spear in their fury.
Given that the labels were in Latin I resorted to Powerpoint and Bing to resolve them, animals first.
So mostly small animals, perhaps eaten incidentally while grubbing around for acorns. But this would not be the case with sheep.
So we know that most of the stomachs contained bits of animals, but we do not know what this amounted to – but the suggestion already noted is that it was not much.
Dominated by the acorns of the holm oak. The rest mainly fruits and berries – with the position of the curious mastic tree of reference 4 being uncertain. Do the boars eat the berries, or the gum?
Evidence that the diet is dominated by acorns, but not proof. The boars could be eating a few token acorns to please the humans, but might then be taking a lot more berries of various sorts. Unlikely but just about possible on the numbers alone.
I suppose the alternative to the sort of study described above would be to spend a lot of time watching pigs and trying to work out from a distance what they were eating at any particular time – in which I dare say modern cameras with their zoom capability would be a big help, but it would still be an expensive business. And you would have to find the botanically knowledgeable people happy to spend long days sitting in hides in woods.
All so much easier when you are feeding your pigs some patent feed from the factory. You just go to the feed factory and ask them. Information which they could hardly claim was commercially sensitive.
Other matters
The UK champion for the Pyrus amygdaliformis mentioned above and snapped immediately above is to be found in Streatham Cemetery on Garrett Lane. To think that I may have walked right past it many times. To be visited next week maybe. See reference 8.
Note: Pyrus is the pear genus with some 3,000 species. This one does not seem to have anything to do with the Pyrus elaeagnifolia at Wisley, noticed at reference 9.
In the margins, I remembered something about Queen Elizabeth making laws to regulate urban pig keeping. On which topic I found Google much more helpful than Bing, this without bothering Gemini. Nevertheless, maybe the difference has something to do with my paying Google for an enhanced service. He also turned up reference 2, written by someone with visibility, for example at reference 3.
From which it seems that we had big government as far back as the middle of the fourteenth century, with the city fathers fussing about the keeping of said pigs. Fussing which not many minutes turns up at the Internet Archive who have a digital copy of volume two of the book in question from the University of Toronto. Translations from the rather dodgy medieval French and Latin are provided.
The second half of the piece in question.
Abebooks can do the two volumes for £100. Ebay wants rather more.
In the margins again, I was interested to read at reference 5 that Lloyd’s bank has diversified to become a big residential landlord – maybe even bigger than the Church Commissioners used to be in their bad old days. For which see reference 6.
While yesterday evening, we finished watching a film from Japan called ‘Perfect days’, to be found at references 7. A reminder that films do not have to have complicated plots, lashings of sex and violence to hold one’s attention. Amazon Prime, but tipped off by a correspondent.
In the course of which, I realised incidentally that there were pop songs from my youth, which I still knew pretty well, without ever having bothered much with their words - but which words were forced into my attention now by sub-titles. Perhaps all part of my inattention to the words of Schubert's songs, also noticed from time to time in these pages.
Conclusions
One could spend quality time devising simple models of the eating habits of Sardinian wild pigs which would enable you to map between the percentage tables we have here and the weight of dry matter tables which we do not have.
References
Reference 1: Vegetable and Animal Food Sorts Found in the Gastric Content of Sardinian Wild Boars (Sus scrofa meridianalis) – W. Pinna, G. Nieddu, G. Moniello, M. G. Cappai – 2007.
Reference 2: Running Amuck? Urban Swine Management in Late Medieval England – Dolly Jørgensen – 2012.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_J%C3%B8rgensen.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistacia_lentiscus.
Reference 5: Lloyds quietly builds £2bn rental portfolio to become major UK landlord: UK bank has acquired 7,500 homes for rent since 2021 as it seeks to diversify income - Simnn Foy, Financial Times – 2025.
Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/number-one-millbank.html.
Reference 7a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days. A big entry for a film.
Reference 7b: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tokyo_Toilet. The inspiration; a project rather than the book that I was expecting.
Reference 8: https://www.treesandshrubsonline.org/articles/pyrus/pyrus-amygdaliformis/.
Reference 9: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/visitor-attraction.html.
Group search key: acornsk.
No comments:
Post a Comment