Travel Photography > Northern Seas > Pomerania, Poland

Dinner is uncle's 70th birthday. That means Germans and Poles and Spaniards and English and French and Dutch. It also means salmon with a mustard sauce, red cabbage, and wild boar in a chanterelle gravy.

The star game of the Von Fleming, who inhabited this palace only as a vacation hunting grounds, had to have been the wild boar. In Northern Europe, it was considered the most dangerous animal - wild, gigantic, prone to charge. The giant head, the very centerpiece of Macjewo’s game room, is evidence of the ancestral boar’s size. These Northern European boars are considered the largest in the world; but their truly wild ancestors are thought to have gone extinct 300 years ago; the same time when Europe literally lost the majority of its animals to overhunting. Whether the living boar is truly the original native animal is not yet known; it is perhaps a result of cross-breeding with domesticated pigs.

The boar is one of Earth’s most far-reaching animals – historically it stretched from Africa to Europe to Asia, including Japan. As with Japan, it crossed into places like England and Scandinavia when Ice Age water levels meant land bridges. Even in the Americas, a set of distant evolutionary cousins thrive from the deserts of Southern Arizona to South America. The rare explorer of Panama’s Darien wilderness is always wary of a potential attack from a hoard of Peccaries.

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