Navigating discreetly: Spatial ecology of urban wild boar in Bordeaux City's landscape of fear, France

An exemplary urban adapter, the wild boar (Sus scrofa) has successfully colonized urban ecological niches worldwide. Improvement of strategies for optimal management of urban wild boar need to gather more empirical evidence of their spatial ecology. This study is based on GPS tracking and capture-mark-recapture (CMR) of 10 and 59 wild boar, respectively, captured in Bordeaux Metropolis (France). It shows that wild boar have become urban dwellers, with intra-urban home ranges varying from 1.3 to 64.6 km² (MCP 100 %) and from 0.5 to 9.6 km² (KDE 95 %), depending on urban conditions. CMR results confirm the low propensity to move away from urban areas (with a mean distance of 2 km between capture and recapture sites), despite a relatively low one-year survival rate since capture (47.5 %), primarily attributable to removal efforts. Wild boar strongly depended on urban woods, mostly during daytime resting, and highly frequented urban meadows during night foraging. Their use of urban agricultural areas was minimal, but they were mostly monitored following corn and grape harvests. Wild boar mitigated the risk associated with close proximity to humans by: a nocturnal activity (72.2 % of active locations registered from sunset to sunrise), which could also be partially attributed to their sensitivity to heat; a strong use of covered habitats, especially during daytime resting and when close to buildings and roads; and a low mobility during night-time foraging (1974 m average daily distance travelled). Moreover, we demonstrate high inter- and intra-individual variability in the spatio-temporal behaviour of urban wild boar. Finally, we discuss the gap between these results and the narratives surrounding the spatial ecology of urban wild boar. Our results not only confirm the species' ability to adapt to urban environments, but also highlight their behavioural flexibility, underscoring the relevance of significant changes in representations and management activities to mitigate human-urban wild boar conflicts.