Hi Wild Thing
I wouldn’t worry about the being human shy bit. We are predators after all and they should be wary of us. If they get too habituated to one predator, they may well not take so much notice of others as well, which would not be good. But, it does sound slightly worrying that the spines are short. Were you able to get a good enough view to see whether they looked normal spines, i.e. going to points? I tend to look at the hogs here through binoculars, so can get a really close up view without upsetting them. The elongated bit might just be them, what I call ‘slinking’ – there are several youngsters here who do that – they move long and low to the ground. Not sure if that is the kind of thing you mean. They tend to grow out of it when they get bigger. Also, the bigger boys do tend to make themselves look longer and taller (but also thinner) (they look bigger from the side) during courtship ‘dances’. Presumably trying to impress the ladies!
If you really want to get into the bigger recording picture, assessment of numbers, etc., you need to get involved in some sort of organised trials/research. I naively thought, a while back, that the records I kept might be of use in a wider context, only to discover that they really weren’t. For them to be of any use on wider scale, they need to follow a specific pattern, be very rigorous, etc. I still keep them for my own benefit and so that I can pass on my observations to other interested people, but I do not feel I need to mark them to achieve this.
So annoying when you have a load of video clips and can’t get at them! possibly worse than realising you forgot to turn the camera on!
