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Feral swine cost the United States at least $3.4 billion a year, no source counts hog hunters, and the rules change at every state line. Here is what each chapter of the 2026-27 Wild Hog report found and what it means for operators.

The Green Swamp is not Florida's trophy story. It is the drive-time story: public deer and hog ground in the middle of the Tampa, Orlando, and Lakeland metros, ringed by private land where an outfitter can actually work. Here is how to market that position for the 2026-27 season, from the Zone B archery opener through spring turkey, with the FWC rules that shape what you can sell.

Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia are among the few southeastern states pursuing elimination, not control, of feral hogs. The math behind that goal -- and the decades-long Great Smoky Mountains case study that tests it -- explains why the answer is still uncertain.

In the ACE Basin's rice-field impoundments and tidal marshes, feral hogs are a long-established presence, rooting through Gullah-Geechee-built levees, tidal flats, and barrier island turtle nests in one of the Southeast's great conservation landscapes.

North Carolina's coastal plain sits at the northern edge of the Southeast's feral hog range, where pocosin peatlands, Carolina bays, and the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary meet an expanding invasive population. It is a case study in what an early-stage invasion looks like -- and what a narrowing window to stop it might still accomplish.

In the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, feral hogs work soybean fields, rice levees, and shrinking bottomland hardwood remnants along the Louisiana black bear's recolonization corridor. Two hundred miles south, the same species roots through longleaf pine restoration plots and listed-species habitat on DeSoto National Forest. One state, two invasions, one management arithmetic.

From the rice levees of Vermilion Parish to the fraying marsh edges of Cameron Parish, feral hogs occupy the seam between farmland and wetland. Their rooting threatens both a rice economy that feeds millions of wintering waterfowl and a coastline already losing ground to the Gulf.

The Atchafalaya Basin is often described as the largest bottomland hardwood swamp left in North America, and one of the most feral-hog-saturated landscapes in the country. Here, dense cover and near-impossible access have turned a management problem into something closer to a permanent ecological condition.

Across the pine plantations and peanut fields of Telfair and Berrien Counties, feral hogs are rooting through the same wiregrass understory that decades of prescribed fire and habitat investment built for wild bobwhite quail. Here is how the invasion intersects with Georgia's private-lands quail tradition.

In Georgia's lower Coastal Plain, the wild hog has reached one of North America's great wetlands: the Okefenokee, a vast rain-fed peat swamp, and the blackwater rivers around it. This synthesis follows the hog onto the swamp's tree islands, into its alligator nests, and down the bottomland corridors: what rooting does to the peat, the alligators, and the swamp's rare wildlife, and why a federal Wilderness is such hard ground to defend.

On Florida's north-central public lands, the wild hog meets a paradox: the Ocala and Osceola national forests and surrounding state lands hold the large, contiguous habitat imperiled wildlife needs, yet open access and limits on lethal control make hogs harder to remove than on private ground. This synthesis follows the hog across the Big Scrub, the longleaf flatwoods, and the springs, and asks why fighting it on public land is so hard.

In the cattle country west of Lake Okeechobee, in the very headwaters of the Everglades, Florida carries one of the densest feral-hog populations in the nation, second only to Texas. This synthesis follows the wild hog into the Central Ranch Belt: how rooting degrades the dry-prairie wetlands that feed Lake Okeechobee, how it threatens imperiled prairie wildlife from the sandhill crane to the crested caracara, and how the hog sits at a disease fence line with a major cattle i

In the Arkansas Delta, an invasive land mammal is colliding with a continental migratory-bird resource. The Grand Prairie around Stuttgart, the Mississippi Flyway's premier duck-wintering ground, runs on rice and managed moist-soil wetlands, and feral hogs root up both. This covers that collision: how rooting destroys the waterfowl food base the refuges cultivate, the cost to farmers, and why Arkansas, still on the invasion's leading edge, may be one of the few places it can

The Alabama Wiregrass is the front line of the Southeast's most important habitat-restoration effort, rebuilding the longleaf pine savanna, and feral hogs are its single most damaging enemy. This synthesis follows the wild hog into the Wiregrass longleaf country along the Florida line: how rooting destroys grass-stage seedlings and the slow-growing wiregrass, how hogs threaten the keystone gopher tortoise, and why a population that crosses the state line defeats single-state

The same rich soil that made the Alabama Black Belt the antebellum cotton kingdom now feeds a serious wild hog invasion, and the vast Mobile-Tensaw Delta gives the hogs a near-impenetrable refuge. This synthesis applies the invasion-biology lens to one landscape: why the Black Belt's chalk-soil farmland and river bottoms are so vulnerable, how the delta's swamp defeats control, and what the hogs do to the forests, the cane, the mast, and the native wildlife.

The Florida Panhandle is a deer market worth telling honestly. Wild Panhandle bucks are smaller-framed than Midwest deer (say so), yet the peanut-belt Marianna-Tallahassee corridor is widely credited with growing some of Florida's biggest deer. This operator report covers the honest body-size pitch, the late Zone D season, the timber-lease economy, and the beach-economy cross-sell.

No animal is remaking the Southeast faster than the wild hog. Descended from Spanish colonial livestock and Eurasian wild boar stocked for hunting, feral Sus scrofa now numbers in the millions — rooting up farmland and forest, eating the eggs of ground-nesting birds, and carrying disease. This synthesis covers the invasion biology: where the hogs came from, why their breeding makes them impossible to remove, the damage they do, and the choice between eradication and endless c

The Southeast holds one of the longest aggregate deer calendars in the country -- opening August 15 in South Carolina and closing February 10 in Alabama -- a six-month arc with five distinct booking windows most outfitters market as one blur. This hub names them, with the latitude rut ladder, pricing by window, and the circuit-hunter play that stacks three states into one season.

Most Florida operators market their deer as a discounted version of a Midwestern hunt. That framing is the mistake. The Seminole whitetail is a distinct, collector-grade subspecies on a calendar few states can match, with Zone A archery opening in early August. The hunters searching for this are few, intensely qualified, and ready to book a premium experience.

The Savannah River corridor in South Carolina's Lowcountry offers one of the Southeast's strongest deer-and-hog combo hunts: liberal buck limits, a long August-to-January season in Game Zone 3, and year-round hogs on private land. This playbook shows how lodges can build on it with combo math, authentic content, and direct bookings.