HARLINGEN — The pack is back.
Neighbors at Parkview Terrace want City Hall to set more traps after they saw javelina return to the neighborhood.
“Someone opened their door and saw three or four of them,” neighbor Susan Mann said yesterday.
Mann said her neighbor saw the javelina Monday night, more than two weeks after city crews removed traps that caught 11 of the wild pigs.
“It could be remnants of the original herd,” Mann said. “They know the place.”
Ramiro Gonzales, the city’s environmental health director, said officials relocated the trapped javelina to a remote area off U.S. 281 near Los Indios.
But Mann believes more wild hogs live along the Arroyo Colorado, from which they climb into the subdivision of garden homes across the road from Hugh Ramsey Nature Park.
Mann said the herd numbered about 20 wild pigs before crews set four traps near the subdivision’s entrance.
“It’s down from the original count but they’re still coming,” Mann said.
Mann said she is requesting city officials to set at least one trap in the neighborhood.
“They never caught all 20,” she said.
Some neighbors are thinking out of the box.
Al Hanz, the subdivision’s business manager, suggested the city install cattle guards to stop the hooved hogs at the subdivision’s entrance.
Now, officials are working with Texas Parks & Wildlife agents to determine what steps they might take, said Melissa Landin, the city’s spokeswoman.
Landin said officials have not determined whether they will set traps to capture the javelina.
Around November, javelina began climbing from banks of the arroyo to the neighborhood, where they ate acorns along oak-lined streets.
First, neighbors built a 6-foot-high wooden fence to keep out the wild pigs.
Then the herd came in through the neighborhood’s entrance.
Like many of his neighbors, Hanz believes the javelina are coming for food after work crews destroyed part of their habitat along the arroyo.
Neighbors began fearing for their pets after clumps of bloody fur were all that remained of a lost cat.
So on Feb. 3, Mann went to City Hall to tell city commissioners, “We’re overrun by javelina.”
About a week later, Gonzales and his crew set four traps that looked like cages measuring 3-feet by 2-feet by 4-feet, baiting them with deer corn.
During the two-week operation, crews captured 11 wild pigs, he said.
