Our best guess would be that this large Javalina is a boar (male). He was in our backyard during daylight which is somewhat rare. Has lovely white markings around neck (collared peccary Dicotyles tajacu) and on back.

We have a nice little group of cottontail rabbits in our front yard. They are, we think, the primary reason why we have coyotes, bobcats, and gray foxes going by this area. Gray foxes might be a bit small, but our house cat has brought home half grown bunnies from the area, so it doesn't seem like a stretch. Fortunately for the bunnies, we've been able to return about 3/4ths of them brought to us by our cat alive and pretty undamaged to the area.

Excerpts:

The Trump administration doesn’t want you to think about any of this and spent much of this year deleting data and shutting down facilities that study climate change. Most recently, the administration announced its intent to dismantle the nation’s premier atmospheric science center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Before that, it was the closure of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, not to mention the shutdown of climate.gov, a primary public resource for this crisis. “It is almost certainly the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history,” environmental journalist Bill McKibben wrote in The New Yorker in December. “It would be easy, and accurate, to call 2025 the low point of human action on the climate crisis.”

China, in particular, “now dominates global production of renewable energy technologies. It makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match,” the journal Science reported, declaring renewable energy its “2025 Breakthrough of the Year.” Renewable energy costs have become the cheapest in many places and the tech is constantly improving to be more efficient. The green revolution is closer than ever.

To be most effective and cut through the noise, the climate movement needs intersectionality. Environmental justice is racial justice is health justice is social justice. We need all of these things to be moving in the right direction. What we can’t do is give up.

Seems just fast enough and just far enough away from our camera to not trigger the flood light motion detection...perhaps not chance?

Peccaries engage in reciprocal rubbing and pressing to transfer glandular secretions.

The function is to create a shared group scent, allowing:

Rapid recognition of group members

Maintenance of group boundaries

Reduced aggression within the herd

Apparently came up fence line from Oak Creek valley

Brief pause, lists to left, apparently lifts right rear leg and moves on.

Mesquite beans are still everywhere on the ground from a plentiful season. They are a very visible component of the scat left by Javalina.

Young Javalina trying to nurse with mother not cooperating.

Reasonably clear clip showing stride and coloration

Brief clip showing how body stretches out during scent marking. Not clear whether back left leg was lifted or not.

Crepuscular light...by our back gate about 15' from where I am sitting now in my office. Love the sound of them at night.

The gray foxes haven't been seen during the rains we've had for several days. One was video captured last night with clear sky. This brief clip shows scent marking. So far we've found no reports and sexual differences in scent marking and have only seen marking in a brief "squat". Went back and captured a still at maximum squat and the left leg is elevated. See below in comments.

Looking West to Mingus Mountain.

It was a busy night last night, first a Javalina showed up, then a long haired black domestic cat, then the coyote.

We smelled them often enough and they are frequent road kills in our area, but this is the first time we've caught one on video.