Traps halt Otway feral pig problems

Pigs have caused thousands of dollars of damage to renovated pastures on properties in the area.

"I think ground shooting would be the last resort," Conservation Ecology Centre Conservation and Research manager Jack Pascoe, Cape Otway, said.

"It tends to shift the problem around the landscape."

He said it was likely an integrated approach to control would eventually be used.

"There have been some really good examples of (poison) Hoggone working really effectively and if that works really well with the trapping we have been doing, that will be fantastic."

Trapping was being carried out in conjunction with fixing GPS collars on six pigs, to track their movements.

"That's limited our ability to do things like baiting, because we don't want to kill our study animals," he said.

"The pigs are coming out to knock off the cockchafers (grubs) in the pastures and doing an immense amount of damage.

"The scale of the issue is really hard to get a grip on."

Dr Pascoe said research and monitoring was going into trying to understand the issue, both from an environmental and landowner perspective.

It appeared the pigs had initially been released deliberately.

"We are making assumptions, but it has all the hallmarks of pigs being released for hunting.

He said the CEC and landowners had been 'relatively successful' at removing most of those animals, where there had been a concentrated trapping effort.

"Our real goal is to try and get the capacity of landowners and land management agencies up to the point where they can be consistently be adopting best practice, across the region."

Dr Pascoe urged landholders to use the FeralScan app to report sightings.

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Margie Drake and Geoff Lavender have a 161-hectare property near Forrest, which borders the Great Otway national park on three sides.

"We have 27 paddocks and where the pigs had been was evident in every paddock, except for the front three.

"They completely destroyed a couple of the paddocks - we meticulously renovate our pastures every year, to ensure we have the best Angus we can sell."

It cost several thousand dollars to renovate a paddock.

"When we first started I don't think anyone realised how bad it was."

"We estimated between $40-50,000 damage had been done.

"The CEC contacted me, initially for deer, as we had a couple of Sambar deer on our place - then we got talking about pigs."

The CEC set up cameras and traps and within five months they had caught 66 pigs.

"There were another 44 in utero, so at that time there would have been 100 pigs, plus ongoing pregnancies."

Ms Drake said the pigs were breeding both in the national park and on forested areas on the property.

They brought in a 'trusted' hunter, but he was only shooting one or two a night.

"One thing the CEC taught me was to identify the mob and trap them, not just use just ground shooting.

'What happens is that you might shoot one, but you then scatter the rest onto neighbouring properties or back into the bush, to come out again later.

"We purchased a few cameras and identified where they were hitting the pastures most - over a couple of weeks we gave them fermented corn.

"Once they got a taste for that there was no stopping them - we put up a monitored trap, you can look at it on your device and drop the gate when the mob is all inside."

She said she was now looking at buying her own traps, as she preferred not to use poison baits.

It appeared the population was now controlled - 'all year around we would see evidence, where pigs had been, but since our last trapping we have had no activity in the paddocks, whatsoever.'