Making Room for the Wild Boar.
An Auria Journal Story.
September 2, 2026
In the Forest of Dean, one of Britain’s lost animals has returned. Its presence is asking a more difficult question of us: how wild are we prepared to let our landscapes become?
The first sign is not the animal, it is the ground.
Along the edge of a track in the Forest of Dean, beneath oak and beech trees still holding the darkness of early morning, the woodland floor has been turned over. Leaves have been pushed aside, soil exposed and roots disturbed across an area large enough to make the neatness of yesterday’s path feel suddenly temporary. Somewhere during the night, while nearby villages slept and the roads through the forest grew quiet, something powerful moved through here with its nose close to the earth.
Walk a little further and the signs continue, a patch of disturbed ground beneath the trees, mud pressed into the edge of a hollow and the impression of a landscape that has been worked, although not by anything carrying tools.
Then, if you are fortunate, the worker itself appears.
A dark shape moves between the trunks ahead, low to the ground and considerably heavier than the woodland shadows initially suggest. It stops briefly, almost disappearing again against bark and bracken, before moving on. Perhaps another follows and at certain times of year there may be piglets behind them, tiny striped animals known locally as humbugs, their markings providing camouflage amongst the shifting patterns of the forest floor.
For hundreds of years this encounter was impossible in Britain. Now, in this corner of Gloucestershire, it is part of the landscape again and that is where the story becomes complicated, because it is easy to want nature back when nature arrives as a red kite drifting silently across a summer sky. It asks very little of us beyond the occasional decision to look up. A wild boar is different, it digs, feeds, breeds, crosses roads and sometimes wanders somewhere we would rather it did not.
It does not simply decorate the landscape, its presence changes it.
And perhaps that makes the return of the wild boar one of the more interesting tests of what we really mean when we say we want a wilder Britain.
A Return Nobody Quite Planned
Wild boar were once part of the British landscape, although the exact chronology of their disappearance is more complicated than popular accounts sometimes suggest. Historical populations were hunted heavily and attempts were made at different times to maintain or re-establish animals in parks and hunting estates. What is clear is that free-living boar had been absent from Britain for centuries by the time commercial wild boar farming expanded during the late twentieth century.
Their modern return did not begin with conservationists opening the gates of carefully prepared release pens. It was all considerably messier than that, with animals escaping from farms, others were deliberately released or abandoned and by the late 1990s viable free-living populations had begun appearing in the British countryside. Around the Forest of Dean, two separate groups eventually became established. One originated from animals that escaped from a wild boar farm near Ross-on-Wye during the 1990s, then in 2004 around 60 farm-reared boar were illegally released near Staunton on the western edge of the forest. By 2009 the populations had merged.
Nobody had designed an ecological masterplan, the boar simply began getting on with being boar.
Today the Forest of Dean holds England’s largest free-living population, while smaller populations are also recorded elsewhere in Britain. In the Dean their numbers have at times grown rapidly, with Forestry England’s monitoring recording estimates above 1,500 animals in both 2016/17 and 2018/19. Management has since reduced those numbers substantially, with the organisation’s latest published figures estimating 583 animals for 2025/26 against a management target of 400.
Those numbers matter because the ecological story of the boar is not as simple as presence being good and absence being bad. As with so much in functioning ecosystems, density changes the perspective.
The Animal That Moves the Earth
Watch a wild boar feeding and its ecological influence becomes immediately understandable. Its snout works like a living plough, supported by powerful neck muscles as it pushes through leaves, roots and soil in search of bulbs, tubers, seeds, insects and other food. A surprisingly large area can be disturbed in a short period of time and to human eyes the result can look like damage and sometimes it is, but disturbance is also one of nature’s oldest processes.
Healthy ecosystems are not necessarily static systems. Trees fall, rivers flood, animals graze, storms tear open woodland canopies and large mammals disturb the ground beneath their feet. These moments create opportunities as light reaches somewhere it did not reach before, bare soil appears, seeds germinate and different insects arrive. Wild boar participate in that process simply by living.
At low densities, Forestry England notes that their rooting and wallowing can break up static ecosystems and create conditions for a greater range of plants and insect life, while Forest Research has noted that disturbance may encourage regeneration in some small-seeded tree species such as birch. It is why wild boar are sometimes described as ecosystem engineers. They do not consciously restore woodland, of course, they are searching for breakfast, yet in doing so they create physical changes that ripple through the communities around them.
There is something appealing about that idea because it shifts restoration away from our instinct to manufacture every desired outcome ourselves. Instead of asking only which species we would like to see in a landscape, we can begin asking which natural processes are missing from it.
Yet the same animal provides its own warning against romanticising the answer. Too much rooting can repeatedly disturb the same ground until little but bare mud remains, while boar can affect woodland regeneration, damage agricultural land, enter gardens and create hazards on roads. The animal therefore resists being placed neatly into one of our typical categories: beneficial or destructive, welcome or unwanted.
The reality is more interesting as a living system depends upon balance and so does coexistence.
How Wild Do We Really Want Wild To Be?
There is a peculiar contradiction developing in modern life. We have become extraordinarily good at removing unpredictability from our immediate surroundings, creating homes that maintain their own temperature, cars that tell us where to turn, food that arrives at our doors and an almost limitless supply of entertainment, information and conversation available through the screens we carry everywhere. Much of this represents genuine progress and there is little virtue in pretending that comfort, safety and convenience have no value, yet the more controlled and frictionless our lives become, the more many of us appear to crave places that offer precisely the opposite.
We drive to the Forest of Dean to walk or cycle beneath trees older than ourselves, choosing paths softened by rain rather than pavements engineered flat, listening for birdsong rather than notifications and feeling weather on our faces instead of another carefully maintained interior climate. Something about being surrounded by a landscape that was not designed entirely around us seems to provide an increasingly necessary freedom from modern life. We enjoy the mud, the fallen branches, changing seasons and the possibility that somewhere beyond the path an animal may be moving unseen amongst the trees.
Then wildness roots up the verge, enters a garden or appears unexpectedly on the path ahead and our relationship with it becomes somewhat more complicated.
Perhaps what many of us really want is not wild nature itself, but the feeling of wild nature, landscapes sufficiently untamed to provide psychological escape while remaining predictable enough not to interfere too greatly with our lives. The wild boar challenges that arrangement because genuine wildness has agency. It moves through the forest according to its own needs, chooses where to feed, reproduces, crosses the paths and roads we use and alters its surroundings without considering whether those changes correspond with our idea of what a well-managed woodland should look like.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that this creates friction. People living alongside the Forest of Dean experience consequences that an occasional visitor does not. Farmers can lose crops, residents may find gardens disturbed, landowners can face damaged boundaries and drivers occasionally encounter a substantial animal on the road. Forestry England advises visitors never to approach or feed wild boar and actively manages the population, recognising that coexistence cannot simply mean allowing numbers to increase indefinitely while asking local communities to absorb the consequences.
Yet neither should inconvenience automatically mean exclusion, because perhaps this is where the more difficult work of restoration begins. We have become accustomed to asking what humans need to do to help nature recover, but the return of animals such as the wild boar introduces another possibility: that successful recovery may eventually require some adaptation from us too.
Perhaps coexistence with nature is not only about changing landscapes, it may also require changing ourselves.
A wild boar turns the woodland floor in the Forest of Dean, creating the kind of disturbance that can look untidy to us while quietly reshaping the ecosystem beneath its feet.
Learning To Share The Landscape
If ecological restoration succeeds, more animals will inevitably begin occupying landscapes that humans also use. Beavers will alter waterways, birds of prey will hunt, large herbivores will browse young trees and wild boar will disturb soil and roots. Success will not always resemble the pristine photograph we might associate with conservation and sometimes a healthier landscape may appear less tidy, less predictable and more complicated than the one it replaces.
The Forest of Dean already embodies much of that complexity. This is not untouched wilderness hidden from human influence but a working forest threaded with roads, villages, forestry operations, cycle trails and walking routes, a place where people arrive every day for work and recreation while deer and boar move through the same landscape. Its value as an example of coexistence lies precisely in that overlap. Nature has not been placed safely on one side of a boundary while people occupy the other. Their lives continually intersect and those intersections require judgement, tolerance and management.
That management matters because Britain no longer contains the natural predator community that once helped regulate animals such as wild boar. Forestry England therefore controls numbers towards a target population, supplying some of the ecological pressure that is otherwise absent. It is an important reminder that wildness does not require abandonment and that stewardship can involve intervention without insisting upon domination. A landscape can be allowed greater freedom while still being carefully observed, understood and, where necessary, managed.
Perhaps that is why the presence of wild boar changes the character of the Forest of Dean even for visitors who never see one. Somewhere beyond the marked trail, something large and genuinely wild is moving unseen through the trees, following patterns and priorities entirely independent of our own. Knowing that alters the experience of being there, with the forest feeling less like somewhere we visit and a little more like somewhere we share.
What The Boar Leaves Behind
By later morning the forest has changed again. Sunlight is beginning to find its way through the canopy, walkers appear along the paths, tyres move across distant trails and somewhere beyond the trees the everyday lives of villages, roads and working life continue. The boar that moved through here during the night are nowhere to be seen, yet their presence remains beneath your feet in leaves pushed aside, dark earth exposed and patches of woodland floor that appear, at first glance, untidy.
Not every consequence will be beneficial and no serious approach to restoration should pretend otherwise. Perhaps that is precisely what makes the return of the wild boar so interesting. It asks whether our ambition is merely to create landscapes that look more natural to human eyes, or whether we are prepared to accommodate some of the unpredictability and occasional inconvenience that genuinely living landscapes inevitably contain.
Somewhere deeper in the Forest of Dean, beyond the paths and morning walkers, a boar will lower its head again and begin searching through the woodland floor. It has no understanding of ecosystem restoration, rewilding or the arguments humans construct around its presence. It simply turns the soil because that is what wild boar have always done, altering the forest through the ordinary business of being alive.
A truly living landscape is not merely scenery arranged around human lives, it has tempos, processes and inhabitants of its own, some beautiful, some inconvenient and many capable of being both.
The wild boar has already made room for itself in the Forest of Dean and so the more interesting question is whether we are prepared to make room for it too.
From the Auria Foundation
At Auria, we are interested in restoration not as an attempt to recreate some perfect version of the past, but as an exploration of what healthier relationships between people and the living world might look like in the future.
The return of the wild boar makes that relationship unusually visible because it is neither simple nor entirely comfortable. Its presence can restore ecological processes that have been missing from British woodland for centuries, yet living alongside it also requires thoughtful management, understanding and something that receives rather less attention in conversations about restoration: tolerance.
As our everyday lives become increasingly controlled and predictable, perhaps coexistence begins, not when nature finally learns to fit neatly around us, but when we become willing to move, just a little, towards it.
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