Hi alanfrew
Yes, I suspect it’s people putting out food and if they’re irresponsible enough to exessively mark hogs, I hope they aren’t feeding mealworms as well, which could be another cause of a fall in population.
Normally here the new markings ease off by this time of year. It’s warmer to stay up later in the Summer. And, of course at the weekends people are possibly more likely to stay up later at night. But the marks do eventually seem to fade, although being marked this late in the season it may not be before hibernation and it depends what they’ve been marked with. But I have even seen particular hogs being re-marked with a different pattern, which seems to indicate that the people who marked it didn’t realise that it had been marked previously. Either that or there are more than one different people/groups of people doing the marking. What a horrible thought.
P.S. Hopefully the hoglet will be o.k. with it’s siblings and adults are usually fairly tolerant of hoglets.
