Prescribed Fire and Wild Pigs: Red Hills Research Findings

Wild pigs are hard to predict, but a multi-year research project out of the Red Hills region is giving landowners a clearer picture of where pigs go, why they go there, and what keeps them from moving in at all.

Dr. Kim Sash, who directs the biological monitoring program at Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy, presented findings from three Farm Bill funded studies during a recent webinar hosted by Pig Brig Trap Systems. The research covers roughly 400,000 acres of quail plantation land straddling the Georgia-Florida line, an area managed almost entirely with frequent prescribed fire.

The results confirm something landowners have suspected for years: fire and hogs do not mix, and understanding that relationship makes trapping a lot more effective.

Watch the full webinar recording here to hear Dr. Sash walk through the research firsthand and answer live landowner questions.

Where the Research Took Place

The Red Hills sits between the Ochlockonee and Aucilla Rivers, south of Thomasville, Georgia, and north of Tallahassee, Florida. Roughly 40 percent of the region is permanently protected under conservation easement, much of it managed as pine dominated upland with a mix of grasses, forbs, and hardwood for maximum biodiversity.

These properties are burned on a one to three year fire return interval, which made the region an ideal place to study how fire frequency affects wild pig behavior over time.

Three Studies, One Funding Source

The research was funded through a Farm Bill feral swine pilot program and broke into three separate projects:

1. Camera monitoring to measure pig impacts on white-tailed deer and wild turkey
2. GPS collar tracking to study pig movement and habitat selection
3. Fecal DNA analysis to determine diet

USDA Wildlife Services handled trapping and removal across the study properties. Their funding arrived before the research funding did, which meant thousands of pigs were already removed before the camera study could establish a full baseline. Even so, the team gathered enough before-and-after data to draw solid conclusions.

How Wild Pigs Change Deer and Turkey Behavior

Over 4,000 pigs were removed from the study properties during the camera monitoring project, which ran for about a year and a half across nine properties using 151 cameras.

Deer Shift Their Schedule Slightly

White-tailed deer are naturally crepuscular, active in early morning and evening. With pigs present, deer activity shifted slightly later in the morning and slightly earlier in the evening, timing their movement to avoid peak hog activity.

Turkeys Avoid Pigs Almost Entirely

Turkeys showed a bigger change. With pigs present, turkey activity spiked in the middle of the day, well outside the normal early morning and late afternoon window hunters expect. Landowners had been telling researchers they weren't seeing turkeys during hunting hours, and this data explains why: the birds were avoiding pigs by shifting their entire activity pattern.

After pig removal, turkey activity moved back toward a normal crepuscular pattern, which points to direct avoidance of pigs rather than a coincidental habitat preference.

How Wild Pigs Move Across Burned and Unburned Land

The GPS collar study tracked 13 pigs (six males, seven females) for periods ranging from 48 to 315 days, producing about 59,000 location fixes.

Home Range Size

• Male home range: roughly 3,800 acres
• Female home range: roughly 1,500 acres
• Combined average: roughly 2,800 acres

Habitat Selection

Regardless of season, pigs consistently selected forested wetlands, upland hardwood, and fields. Upland pine and planted pine were avoided year-round, and open water was selected only during the high forage season (May through December), otherwise avoided.

Time Since Fire Changes Everything

This is the finding with the most direct management value. As time since the last prescribed burn increased, pig use of forested wetland, upland pine, and planted pine all increased. Around the three to four year mark without fire, previously avoided pine habitat starts becoming appealing to pigs.

In other words, skipping a burn cycle does not just leave habitat unmanaged. It actively creates pig habitat.

Researchers used this data to build seasonal probability maps, essentially heat maps showing where pigs were statistically most likely to be on a given property based on land cover and season. Trappers used these maps to skip the guesswork and start looking for sign in the highest probability zones first.

Why Pigs Return to the Same Bedding Sites

Collar data revealed tight clusters of repeated GPS points, which turned out to be loafing or bedding sites used by multiple pigs from multiple sounders, not just one family group.

Researchers measured 114 bedding sites and found a consistent pattern: low basal area, meaning open space between trees and not much midstory clutter, roughly one to one and a half meters above the ground. That openness makes it easy for pigs to move through and provides the shaded thermal cover they need to cool off.

These sites were almost always in areas that had gone without fire long enough to allow pine encroachment and midstory shading, exactly the conditions that fire is designed to prevent.

A Practical Takeaway for Trapping

Targeting unburned patches on a property, particularly forested wetland edges and areas with pine encroachment, gives trappers a much better starting point than searching a property at random.

What Wild Pigs Actually Eat

The diet study analyzed fecal DNA from 413 pigs (28 in Georgia, 385 in Florida) across 11 counties. Average sounder size was 15 animals, with one sounder as large as 32.

Findings included:

• 11 amphibian species, the most frequently detected group, led by green anoles, southern cricket frogs, squirrel tree frogs, spring peepers, and southern leopard frogs
• 10 fish species, including one saltwater species (grouper) likely scavenged along the coast
• 9 bird species, including bobwhite quail (wild turkey did not appear)
• 6 mammal species, including deer, possibly through scavenging
• 4 reptile species, including a rare mole skink and the study's only snake species, which was venomous

Seventeen pigs had multi-species profiles in a single sample, suggesting broad foraging through wetland habitat rather than targeted predation on any one species.

Reading Diet Data With Caution

Fecal DNA captures roughly a 24-hour window of what a pig consumed, and it cannot distinguish active predation from scavenging, egg or larval stage consumption, or incidental contact with feces from another animal. The takeaway is not a precise predation rate on any single species. It is confirmation that wild pigs are broadly opportunistic feeders capable of affecting native reptiles, amphibians, fish, and ground-nesting birds across a wide range of habitat types.

Why Shooting at a Pig Backfires

One collared male offers a clear illustration of why trapping outperforms shooting. Before any disturbance, this pig held a home range of about 640 acres with strong site fidelity, repeatedly returning to the same locations.

A USDA Wildlife Services trapper attempted to shoot the pig and missed. The pig's home range immediately expanded to roughly 8,700 acres, more than thirteen times its prior range, and it took four and a half to five months to settle back into a smaller, more predictable pattern.

The lesson: a missed shot does not just fail to remove a problem pig. It makes that pig far less predictable and considerably harder to trap for months afterward. Predictable pigs are the easiest pigs to trap, which is exactly what a missed shot destroys.

What This Means for Managing Pigs on Your Own Property

Dr. Sash's core recommendations for landowners:

• Let prescribed fire creep into forested wetlands and ecotone transition zones instead of stopping it at a fire break. This reduces pig cover and benefits reptiles and amphibians that depend on that habitat edge.
• Burn on a cycle short enough to stay ahead of pig habitat formation, generally inside the three to four year mark.
• Use unburned patches to target trapping effort instead of searching a whole property at random.
• If burning is not an option, connect with a Prescribed Burn Association (PBA) in your area. These groups pool equipment, share expertise, and in many cases carry liability insurance, and they work with landowners on properties of any size, including small acreage tracts.
• Trap. Do not shoot, unless you are confident in the shot. A miss creates a far more difficult, far less predictable animal.

Ready to stop shooting and start trapping? See the Pig Brig Trap System.

Questions and Answers

Are the reported home ranges per pig or an average across the study?
The reported acreage figures, 3,800 acres for males and 1,500 for females, are individual home range sizes, not group averages.

How deep will pigs root to find food?
There is no hard measurement from this study, but based on field observation, three to four inches is typical, with depth depending on soil moisture, compaction, and how nutritionally stressed the pig is.

Does deer activity return quickly after a burn?
Yes. Deer return to burned areas almost immediately, often within about two weeks, since the regrowth is highly palatable and nutritious. The study found no negative effect on deer use of recently burned ground.

How long does a prescribed burn stay effective at deterring pigs?
Roughly three to four years. Land burned within that window was consistently avoided by pigs. Beyond that, pine habitat starts becoming attractive again.

Where can a landowner find help arranging a prescribed burn?
Contact a Prescribed Burn Association in your area, your state forestry association, or your local extension service. Tall Timbers also operates a private lands burn team and has helped establish new PBAs, including one in Texas (pbatex.org).

Is there a minimum acreage for a prescribed burn to be worthwhile?
No. Most PBAs are built specifically to help small acreage landowners, and many will assist with tracts as small as 20 to 50 acres.