Science - December 7, 2010

Students film wild boar

For the first time in decades there are wild boar in the forested ridge called the Utrechtse Heuvelrug. Two Wageningen students have managed to film them, in preparation for a bigger adventure.

A camera trap in a tree.
Christoph Janzing and Stefan Sand made it into the Dutch news on the NOS headlines. But for them, this film is just a small chapter in a bigger story. 'We really want to go to Turkey to film a Persian leopard', says Janzing, in his fifth year as a student of Forest and Nature Management. 'They are extremely rare, so it is a mega-project.'

In order to gain some experience, the two students borrowed a camera trap from the Dutch youth association for nature study. 'During a recce we saw a black shadow dashing into the brambles and we heard a grunt', says Janzing. 'Unfortunately, the animal was gone then.' So the two snap-hunters set out to look for traces of boar, such as food or hair. Then they set up three camera traps: small cameras that film everything that passes in front of them. And a week later they bagged their prey:

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