Hogs in the High Country: How Wild Boar Are Rooting Up Austria’s Alpine Pastures
When hunters think of wild boar, they usually picture cornfields in the milk stage, bait sites after dark, and sounders capable of tearing apart an entire field overnight. In the Austrian Alps, the conflict is playing out more quietly—but it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. More and more alpine pastures are being literally plowed up by wild boar. Beneath the sod, the animals find exactly what they are looking for: roots, tubers, rhizomes, worms, insect larvae, and other high-energy food sources. And changing climatic conditions may be making it easier for them to push farther into the mountains.
By morning, an alpine meadow can look as though someone ran a rotary tiller across it during the night. Chunks of sod lie upside down, dark soil is exposed, and deep furrows cut through what had been an intact pasture only hours earlier. No storm. No machinery. Wild boar.
For hunters in Lower Austria or Burgenland, this kind of scene is nothing unusual. In Salzburg’s Lungau region, Carinthia, or other parts of alpine Austria, it has historically been a different story. At least, it used to be.
Austria Is Still Far From Being Wild Boar Country
A look at the hunting statistics shows just how unevenly wild boar are distributed across Austria. During the 2024/25 hunting year, hunters harvested 29,052 wild boar nationwide. What stands out, however, is where those animals were taken. Lower Austria and Burgenland alone accounted for 24,847 animals—roughly 86 percent of the entire Austrian harvest.
Salzburg reported only 98 wild boar, Tirol five, and Vorarlberg just three. Carinthia recorded 632, while Styria reported 1,794. Harvest statistics are not the same thing as population estimates, of course. But they provide a useful indication of where wild boar are concentrated.
For comparison, hunters in Germany harvested around 571,000 wild boar during the 2024/25 season—nearly 20 times the Austrian total. Hungary requires a more nuanced look. For decades, the country was considered classic wild boar country, but African swine fever and the aggressive population-control measures associated with the disease have sharply reduced numbers in recent years.
One thing remains clear: Austria’s alpine regions are still sparsely populated by wild boar compared with the eastern lowlands. And that is precisely what makes the current trend so interesting. In some areas, “almost never seen” is slowly becoming “regularly present.”
The Lungau May Offer a Glimpse of What’s Coming
The trend is particularly noticeable in Salzburg. For several years, the Salzburg hunting association has reported increasing numbers of wild boar in the Lungau region. Rooting damage on alpine pastures can be severe, and the situation is compounded by the short growing season at higher elevations. Damage that might recover relatively quickly in a lowland meadow can remain visible for much longer in the mountains.
In 2025, farmers in Lungau were already reporting several sizeable sounders. Significant agricultural damage was documented around Kendlbruck, Lessach, and Göriach. Local estimates have even suggested that several hundred wild boar may now be present in the district. Those figures should be treated cautiously—they are field estimates, not the result of a scientific population census—but they illustrate the concern among hunters and landowners.
An unusual research project shows how seriously the issue is being taken. The Lungau hunting community began working with BOKU University in Vienna to fit wild boar with tracking collars. The original goal was to capture and monitor as many as 20 animals in order to study their movements and home ranges using telemetry. By the 2025 district hunters’ meeting, three wild boar had been successfully fitted with transmitters. The goal is not simply to learn where the animals move through the mountains. Researchers and hunters also hope the data will help develop more effective management and hunting strategies.
The need for that research says a great deal. We know an enormous amount about wild boar living in traditional agricultural and woodland habitat. We know far less about pigs moving between mountain forests, alpine pastures, and high-elevation terrain.
Winter Used to Draw the Line
Wild boar are not high-mountain specialists. Ibex and chamois are physiologically adapted to life at elevation. Wild boar are not.
The Carinthian hunting association therefore describes their traditional habitat as lowlands, floodplains, and mid-elevation forests. High alpine terrain offers too little food for wild boar to occupy it permanently. At the same time, however, the association points to increasingly frequent beech and oak mast years, along with corn cultivation, as factors helping wild boar expand their range. Numbers have also been increasing in Carinthia.
Historically, winter was one of the most effective natural barriers. Deep snow costs energy. It makes movement difficult and, perhaps more importantly for a rooting animal, blocks access to the soil. But that barrier becomes increasingly porous when winters are milder and snow cover is reduced.
A widely cited study by researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna examined long-term European data and found that wild boar population growth is strongly associated with milder winters. Heavy mast years—particularly those producing large quantities of beechnuts—can add another boost. More food improves body condition, survival, and reproductive success. The researchers concluded that climate change may favor wild boar populations directly through warmer winters and indirectly through changes in food availability.
For the Alps, that distinction matters. It does not mean wild boar are suddenly becoming true high-country animals. It means areas that were once energetically unattractive or inaccessible for months at a time may now remain usable for longer periods of the year.
What Are Wild Boar Looking for on an Alpine Pasture?
This is where the story gets particularly interesting. In agricultural country, the equation is relatively straightforward. Grain, potatoes, and especially corn provide huge amounts of energy. When corn reaches the milk stage, wild boar get both food and cover in the same place—a combination that can become a nightmare for farmers and hunters alike.
But at 5,000 or 6,500 feet, there usually isn’t a cornfield waiting for them. So why are they digging? A study from the French Alps provides a surprisingly clear answer.
Researchers analyzed fecal and stomach samples from wild boar over several years across elevations ranging from approximately 2,000 to nearly 7,900 feet. On average, 99 percent of the food identified was plant material.
The largest single category consisted of underground plant parts, particularly roots, tubers, bulbs, and other storage organs, accounting for roughly 39 percent of the diet. And it becomes even more interesting as elevation increases.
Above roughly 6,200 feet, roots and other underground plant material accounted for as much as 71 percent of the diet in the study. As fruits and other easily available foods became scarcer, the animals increasingly shifted their feeding activity below the surface.
That is exactly why an alpine pasture visited by a sounder can look the way it does.
Wild boar are not simply grazing the grass. They are looking underneath it.
A Wild Boar Doesn’t Dig—It Plows
The distinction matters. Using its powerful snout, a wild boar can move an astonishing amount of soil. It lifts the turf, flips over chunks of sod, and works systematically through areas where it detects food.
Ecologists sometimes describe wild boar as “ecosystem engineers” because their behavior can physically alter the habitat around them.
To an alpine farmer, however, “ecosystem engineer” sounds considerably more romantic than the reality. After a night of heavy rooting, more than grass has disappeared. The surface becomes rough and uneven, making grazing and mechanical management more difficult. The continuous sod layer is broken apart, bare soil is exposed, and forage production can decline—at least temporarily.
At higher elevations, another factor makes the damage particularly serious:
Time. A valley meadow has a comparatively long growing season. An alpine pasture at 5,500 or 6,500 feet does not. If a large area is rooted up in fall, the scars may remain visible well into the following summer.
New Research Suggests Damage Can Last for Years
A 2025 study conducted in the eastern Italian Prealps examined exactly this problem. Researchers compared different restoration methods on 16 alpine farms where pastures had been heavily damaged by wild boar.
One of the more surprising findings was that simply leaving the damaged ground alone was not necessarily the worst option from an ecological standpoint. Native vegetation recovered relatively well on its own. From an agricultural perspective, however, that approach had drawbacks. The productivity and usability of the pastures remained more heavily impaired during the first two years, while the rough surface continued to complicate grazing and mechanical work.
Overall, one of the most favorable approaches involved mechanically leveling or lightly working the disturbed soil without reseeding it with non-native commercial forage mixtures. That allowed pasture productivity to recover relatively quickly while preserving more of the original plant community than intensive reseeding.
For alpine farming, the finding is significant. The real damage does not necessarily end when the sounder leaves. That is when the repair work begins.
But Is Rooting Always Ecologically Harmful?
There is another side to the story. Not every piece of sod flipped over by a wild boar automatically constitutes an ecological disaster. In certain abandoned or structurally uniform grasslands, small-scale soil disturbance can actually create additional habitat diversity. Research in Germany has found that wild boar rooting in unmanaged calcareous grasslands can, under some conditions, increase plant diversity. Other studies have identified positive effects for certain insect species.
That does not necessarily contradict the experience of alpine farmers. The key factors are location, intensity, and land use. A few patches of exposed soil in an abandoned grassland may improve structural diversity. A large sounder turning over acres of productive alpine pasture is a very different situation—and a very real agricultural loss. As is so often the case in wildlife management, the dose makes the difference.
One Boar Isn’t the Real Problem
A single mature boar moving through a mountain hunting district is not going to transform the landscape. The situation changes when breeding sounders become established. Wild boar have extraordinary reproductive potential. Abundant food improves body condition and reproductive output, while mild winters increase piglet survival.
As a result, populations can grow rapidly under favorable conditions. Across Europe, wild boar have become one of the continent’s most successful large mammals. A modeling study published in 2026 estimated the total European population before the hunting season at somewhere between 13.5 and 19.6 million animals, depending on the dataset and methodology used.
That does not mean thousands of pigs are about to pour across Austria’s timberline. But perhaps that is not even the right question. Instead of asking, “Can wild boar live in the high mountains?” The better question may be: How often do they actually need to?
A sounder can bed securely in mountain forest during the day, move onto alpine pastures after dark, travel several miles in search of food, and retreat to lower elevations when conditions deteriorate. The mountains do not need to become permanent year-round habitat for wild boar to cause recurring damage there.
A New and Difficult Challenge for Alpine Hunters
That is exactly what makes wild boar such a difficult new challenge in alpine hunting districts. In traditional wild boar country, hunters have decades of experience, established infrastructure, and proven management strategies. Travel corridors are known. Bedding areas are understood. Neighboring hunting districts often coordinate their efforts. Where wild boar are only beginning to appear, much of that knowledge is missing.
Their mobility makes matters even more complicated. That is why the telemetry project in Lungau is so important. Hunters are trying to understand how wild boar use the landscape and how they move between valleys, forests, and alpine grazing areas.
From a management standpoint, there is a strong argument for reacting early rather than waiting until stable breeding sounders become firmly established. An occasional boar moving through a hunting district can be an exciting opportunity. A growing population that repeatedly causes agricultural damage quickly becomes a cross-boundary wildlife management problem. And anyone who assumes the issue can simply be solved at the nearest cornfield is missing the central point: In the mountains, wild boar do not need corn to survive. The alpine pasture itself can provide food.
Then There’s African Swine Fever
In 2026, the issue has another dimension. Austria remains free of African swine fever (ASF), but the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety, AGES, currently classifies the risk of introduction as high. In July 2026, ASF cases in wild boar were reported in countries including Germany, Italy, Slovakia, and Hungary. At that time, the confirmed case nearest the Austrian border was approximately 98 kilometers—about 61 miles—away in Hungary. For that reason, wild boar found dead in Austria must be reported and tested for the virus.
The expansion of wild boar populations is therefore no longer simply an issue of hunting and agricultural damage. It is also a matter of animal-disease management.
Wild Boar Aren’t Conquering the Peaks—They’re Expanding Their Range
Austria is still a long way from becoming wild boar country on the scale of Germany. And from a hunting standpoint, there is a world of difference between the Danube floodplains of Lower Austria and an alpine pasture in Lungau.
But the boundary between traditional boar habitat and the high country is becoming less distinct. Milder winters, improved survival, and the remarkable adaptability of an opportunistic omnivore mean wild boar are increasingly using areas where they were once rare.
Perhaps the most fascinating clue comes from what they eat. The higher wild boar move into the mountains, the more important the food beneath the pasture appears to become. In the French Alps, above roughly 6,200 feet, more than two-thirds of the diet examined during certain periods consisted of roots and other underground plant material.
Crocus corms may be part of that menu. So can earthworms. For the boar, it is simply another meal. For an alpine farmer, the aftermath can look as though someone pulled a plow across half the pasture during the night. And for Austria’s hunting community, that may turn out to be one of the most underestimated wildlife-management challenges of the years ahead.
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