He’s been collecting footage of feral hogs in and around the river north of Redington ever since.
A screenshot from a trail camera video shows feral pigs rooting in a mesquite forest along the San Pedro River northeast of Tucson in 2020.
“Sometimes I’ll get two or three or four, and then I’ll get 20 plus,” said Miller, whose desert wildlife videos on YouTube have earned him more than 24,000 subscribers. “Every now and then, I get a big herd, but for the most part they’re just in small pockets.”
His most dramatic video is a four-second clip that opens with a puff of dirt and the dark colored streak of a pig running past, followed a few beats later by a large black bear in hot pursuit.
Miller has also had a few in-person encounters with wild hogs. It’s “an adrenaline rush” each time, he said, but none of the boars ever charged at him or otherwise acted aggressively. “They behaved like any other wild animal would. If they hear something, see something, they’re out of there.”
Miller said he operates anywhere from five to 12 motion-activated cameras on public land along several miles of the river and the surrounding hills north of Redington.
He captures almost all of his hog footage during the summer months. “I don’t know where they go when it gets colder, but it’s somewhere else,” he said. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”
Last year, Miller was contacted by someone from the USDA who had seen his videos and wanted to know more about where he was finding feral hogs.
Feral hogs caught on trail camera near the San Pedro River northeast of Tucson.
He ended up going out into the field with the government hunter more than a dozen times over the summer and early fall, as the guy set up cameras of his own and even managed to shoot a couple of pigs. The man collected blood and other samples from his kills before hauling the carcasses away, Miller said.