Free Feral Cities by Tristan Donovan Page B

Berlin
    â€œSmell! Smell!” says Derk Ehlert, using his hand to waft the air toward his nose. He takes a long, deep breath. “You can smell them.
Mmm. Mmm. Ahhhh.”
    I sniff the forest air, wondering what it is I’m supposed to smell and then it hits: a whiff that brings dank mushrooms to mind.
    It’s the smell of wild boar.
    We’re in Berlin. Grunewald, the large forest in the city’s southwest, to be precise. It’s dusk and the fading light makes it hard to see, but somewhere in the trees straight ahead of us are boars.
    Not only can we smell them, but we can hear them too: the rustle of hooves moving through leaves, the snorts of boars snuffling in the soil, and a moist crunching sound. “They are eating all the acorns,” whispers Derk in his German-accented English.
    More munching noises come from the trees. Then, an abrupt squeal. Something moves in the shadows, but I can’t make it out. “A call from the ma,” says Derk.
    Everything’s suddenly silent. The rustling, snuffling and munching has stopped. The boars have realized we’re here. “They are freezing,” says Derk. “They can smell us.”
    The silence lasts half a minute and then there’s a deep groan, a long, drawn-out
ooooorrrrgggghhh.
We catch a glimpse of a piglet moving away from us into the bushes and then the sound of more movement. The boars are leaving.
    We’ve unnerved them. The boars of Berlin may be used to people, but we’re not acting right and that could mean we’re hunters, so they’ve opted to head deeper into the trees and further away from us.
    â€œHunters behave differently,” says Derk. “They sneak up, go off the paths. Hunters, if they want to see the boars, might talk out loud to themselves because for the boars normal, talky people walking along are not a problem. It’s the sneaking people with the funny smell that worry them.”
    More than three thousand of these coarse-haired wild pigs live in Berlin. We may have gone looking for them in Grunewald, but their search for food makes them regular visitors to the city streets. In the suburbs they dig up gardens, tip over bins to get to leftovers, and plough the parks. One time wild boars tore up a Second World War cemetery, uprooting gravestones and causing thousands of dollars’ worth of damage.
    Another time, they broke through the fence guarding the training field of Berlin soccer club Hertha BSC. Once inside they ripped up the pitch to feast on the roots and grubs below the grass. The club repaired the fence, but the shaggy vandals returned, found a new way in, and churned up the pitch for a second time.
    The boars are aided in their search by an amazing sense of smell. Their noses are three times as sensitive as those of dogs, making them capable of sniffing out damp soil from as far as two miles away. Perfect for finding the prime feeding spots in the city.
    As Berlin’s only wildlife officer, Derk has plenty of experience with the boars. The day before I visited, he had to deal with one that got hit by a car while crossing a busy road. Though the boars usually leave people alone, when wounded they can be dangerous.
    In fall 2012 another collision caused a 260-pound boar to go onthe rampage in the leafy western Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. The first victim was an elderly man, who was bitten on the back of his leg. The boar then knocked over an old lady before attacking a young woman who had to scramble on top of a parked car to escape. When a policeman came to the rescue, the boar charged at him, cutting the officer’s leg. The injured officer ended up drawing his gun and fatally shooting the animal in the middle of the usually quiet residential street.
    The previous day’s incident was less serious. Well, for Berliners, at least. “The boar was mortally wounded but still alive, so it was really important it was killed,” Derk tells me as we drive