Hunters say New Zealand's wild pig population is booming, and the COVID-19 lockdowns could be partly to blame.
It's thought the time Kiwis spent indoors allowed the introduced pests to spread further into the great outdoors.
Wild pigs haven't always been this easy to find.
"You might catch a pig a month you know when we were younger, teenage years, but now probably 80 percent of the time you go out you catch a pig," pig hunter Paul Becroft said.
Becroft has been pig hunting for 40 years.
"I just love it, it's just that hunter-gatherer you know, and getting a feed."
No longer confined to the old haunts, wild pigs are now more widespread.
"They're definitely making themselves known," he said.
And it's noticed, especially on farms, where they're leaving a trail of destruction.
"Where it's wet, they'll dig the ground up," another pig hunter, Bill Westwood, said.
But turning over the ground looking for grubs and worms isn't the only damage they're doing.
"The pigs can attack the newborn lambs," Becroft said.
It's not clear why the pig population is growing, but hunters believe it could be down to a combination of COVID-19 lockdowns and two mild winters.
"We haven't had a good snow for 12 years, and the winters have been a bit warmer, so the survival rate of the little ones is probably better," Becroft said.
"Pigs breed up quite fast, compared to a domestic pig that might have 20 piglets in a litter in the wild they have between five and seven in a litter. Anything bigger than seven and you've got a really good condition sow, it comes down to their condition and food," Westwood said.
Pigs are also prevalent on Department of Conservation (DoC) land.
Of the 1350 monitored DoC sites, pigs were found to inhabit 57 percent of the monitored North Island sites and 37 percent of the monitored South Island sites - threatening native plants and invertebrates.
The only threat to the pigs is more hunters.
"Pig hunters come in waves, you'll get a lot of people get into the sport when the pig numbers start rising up and then all of a sudden they start cleaning out the pigs in the areas they've gone to," Westwood said.
"I think probably social media, you know, magazines all that sort of thing, every second truck has a dog box on it now," Becroft said.
And a catch alongside it.
