Wild boar
Diet

The wild boar is a highly versatile omnivore, whose diversity in choice of food is comparable to that of humans. Their foods can be divided into four categories:

A 50 kg (110 lb) boar needs around 4,000–4,500 calories of food per day, though this required amount increases during winter and pregnancy, with the majority of its diet consisting of food items dug from the ground, like underground plant material and burrowing animals. Acorns and beechnuts are invariably its most important food items in temperate zones, as they are rich in the carbohydrates necessary for the buildup of fat reserves needed to survive lean periods. In Western Europe, underground plant material favoured by boars includes bracken, willow herb, bulbs, meadow herb roots and bulbs and the bulbs of cultivated crops. Such food is favoured in early spring and summer, but may also be eaten in autumn and winter during beechnut and acorn crop failures. Should regular wild foods become scarce, boars will eat tree bark and fungi, as well as visit cultivated potato and artichoke fields. Boar soil disturbance and foraging have been shown to facilitate invasive plants. Boars of the vittatus subspecies in Ujung Kulon National Park in Java differ from most other populations by their primarily frugivorous diet, which consists of 50 different fruit species, especially figs, thus making them important seed dispersers. The wild boar can consume numerous genera of poisonous plants without ill effect, including Aconitum, Anemone, Calla, Caltha, Ferula and Pteridium.

Boars may occasionally prey on small vertebrates like newborn deer fawns, leporids and galliform chicks. Boars inhabiting the Volga Delta and near some lakes and rivers of Kazakhstan have been recorded to feed extensively on fish like carp and Caspian roach. Boars in the former area will also feed on cormorant and heron chicks, bivalved molluscs, trapped muskrats and mice. There is at least one record of a boar killing and eating a bonnet macaque in southern India's Bandipur National Park, though this may have been a case of intraguild predation, brought on by interspecific competition for human handouts. There is also at least one recorded case of a group of wild boar attacking, killing, and eating an adult, healthy female axis deer (Axis axis) as a pack.
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