Hunting Pesky Pigs in Hawaii Cory Lum for The New York Times Negotiating a tangle of trees on the hunt for wild pigs in Oahu. Our plan the first day was not to kill the beast but to follow him, to observe his home and habits, to see the evil that he did and maybe get in his face. For this, Sonny took me to Maunawili, a neighborhood tucked beneath the razor-ridged Koolau mountains on the windward side of Oahu. He parked his truck at a house at the forest's edge, put on camo gear and boots and backpack, and led me to a path behind the swimming pool that plunged into the jungly green. The bright sun gave way to dappled darkness. Octopus trees, their rubbery leaves splayed on umbrella spines, wild ginger, thick-trunked avocado and mango trees, a lush understory of ferns and pili grass - we were in a classic Hawaiian wilderness, but a damaged one. Sonny pointed out the signs: the erosive trails the beast had trampled, the ravaged stream banks and fields of blackened muck he had nuzzled and plowed with bladelike tusks, looking for roots and worms. We saw his muddy wallowing spots. We saw droppings. We saw cloven hoof prints - his own and the tiny pairs of dots, incongruously dainty, left by his abundant and ravenous spawn. Under a towering avocado tree, Sonny stopped. He held a finger to his lips. We stared across at a low thicket of ferns. The fronds swayed and shuddered, and I caught a glimpse of a splotch of darkness that could have been a shadow, or the black bristling snout of feral boar. Sonny took out his hog call, a tube with a reed and a rubber squeeze bulb, and trumpeted a soft, low grunt. Then he made chomping noises with his mouth. He had told me that pigs, being pigs, chew with their mouths open. "They call them pigs because they eat like pigs," he explained. The idea was to make the pig think another pig was eating his lunch. Chomp, chomp, went Sonny. I thought, I can do that. I smacked my lips the way you do when trying to get a 5-year-old to knock it off. Sonny rustled leaves, to heighten the illusion of careless grazing: swish, swish. Chomp, chomp. Grunt. The boar went no farther. We waited. We soon realized he had melted, unfooled, back into the underbrush. It's like that with wild pigs. "They're very well educated," Sonny said. Sonny Thater, a licensed fishing and hunting guide, is a professional pig eradicator, on call for homeowners and businesses with nuisance pigs, and for tourist hunters looking for an unusual trophy. He is one of many in Hawaii who grew up hunting pigs, an old family tradition that dates at least to the islands" plantation days of the early 20th century. Sonny is one of the very few who have made a business of it. He is thickset and wears his hair in a bristle cut, yet even when dressed head to toe in camo and holding a bayonet, he looks gentle, like someone who'd bring you coffee and doughnuts if you asked. I had found Sonny online, at hookyouupoutfitters.com. Everybody knows that the Hawaiian Islands are an imperiled Eden, a global hot spot for threatened and endangered species. But even though I had grown up there, I had never done much to help it, until I thought of a way to do my part: go there and kill some pigs. It seemed like a righteous mission, and Sonny was going to guide me. The story of the Fall is this: Somebody in the Garden eats what he's not supposed to and messes things up for everybody else. Hawaii's hospitable habitat has long been overrun by opportunistic outsiders: feral sheep, feral goats, even feral cows, along with mongooses and exotic birds. Hoofed livestock, brought by Europeans, has done the most damage, and with their boundless appetites and unchecked fertility, Eurasian feral pigs, Sus scrofa, are the worst of the worst. These are not the little Asian domesticated pigs that Native Hawaiians farmed for centuries, but descendants of the big European swine that started getting loose and going native after Captain Cook put Hawaii on the map in 1778. "They rototill the planet," Dr. David Duffy, a biology professor at the University of Hawaii, told me. On my visit in February, he and Dr. Thane Pratt, an authority on Hawaiian forest birds, explained the problem. Feral pigs eat native plants and, through their scat, spread invasive ones like the forest-clotting strawberry guava. Indirectly, they slaughter birds - the stagnant, mucky wallows they dig breed mosquitoes that carry avian malaria. Their only redeeming trait is that they are delicious, which was the other reason that, two days after our Maunawili probing expedition, Sonny took me out for the kill.