COLUMBIA, S.C. — Congaree National Park will be closed for 24 hours starting the night of November 15 to tackle a growing feral hog problem.
Park officials say there will be a heavy focus on areas near the Harry Hampton Visitor Center and boardwalk trail, where wildlife officials will be using firearms, including high-powered rifles, to manage the hogs.
South Carolina has seen a recent and dramatic increase in the distribution and abundance of wild hogs, something Congaree National Park Chief of Visitor Services John Manchester said he has noticed.
“The big issue here is they are here, they are very prolific, and they have a tendency to be very destructive,” Manchester said.
Officials say their presence has led to an increase in natural, agricultural, and developmental landscape destruction.
“They can cause great disruption to a lot of different types of plant and animal life," Manchester said. "They are also disease vectors, so they do carry a wide number of different types of diseases – some that are transmissible to humans, others that only transition to other animals – but we don't want that to happen because that could mean someone's livestock or even pets. We don't know necessarily if we have come into contact with that stuff. They're in mud, mud is everywhere out here. So, we have to make sure that those interactions don't occur. That's why this kind of work is necessary.”
The park is taking action by using their resource management staff and visitor resource protection services to help decrease the number of hogs within the area. That means shutting down the park for at least 24 hours a of couple times a year.
“People who are wildlife management, in that kind of work field, are trained to recognize behavior," Manchester said. "They know where to go, what to look for and how to take care of that from the resource management side.”
The park will close at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, November 15 and remain closed through Thursday. The park is expected to open for normal hours on Friday, November 17.