April 19, 2015 -- Here Piggy, Piggy! No Name Cay, Abaco, Bahamas

First of all, I want to mention that if someone or some entity can name an island No Name  Cay, then why didn't they just go ahead and give it a substantial real name?  I don't get it.

Anyway, while we were visiting New Plymouth (that's the town at Green Turtle Cay which is appropriate considering the Loyalist background), we came upon a sign at the government offices notifying folks that the pigs on No Name Cay would love for you to share in your foodstuffs and water for their care.  The Pig Whisperer, also known as a guy named Craig, usually went out on the weekends to take them bread, fruits, cookies, etc.  He put together a flier to ask that residents and tourists feel free to make donations to the food fund or take food themselves to the island.  He mentioned that there were boxes for food and a tub and buckets for fresh water.

I thought it would be a nice thing to do for the pigs.  We had heard about another island in the Exumas, called Staniel Cay, where the wild pigs were quite the tourist draw.

So we left Green Turtle and sailed over to No Name.  When we arrived, we noticed a small motorboat near shore.  We anchored and dinghied over; we had bananas and biscuits and apples with us.

The guide of the boat had taken food up to the stores on land and tootled his horn when he got back on the boat.  The horn must have woken up the mama pigs from their afternoon slumber; one came running down the beach from the brush and shortly thereafter, another came along.  Fairly big sows they were; one brown and one with stripes.  A woman from the other boat, around my age, got in the water to throw food to the pigs, but she was smart; as they started swimming toward her, she rightly got back on her boat.

That boat left the beach and the pigs saw us with their little steely eyes; they started swimming over.  We threw some biscuits near to shore to distract them because Gary wanted to take the bag of stuff to the shore side where the babies (we heard there were babies!) might get a nibble.

The striped mama got a little overzealous and attempted to clamber into the dinghy, an action that I, as the acting safety officer, was not happy about.   (And it scared me.  These were not small cute pink piggies.  These were pigs that could make a nice meal out of a person.  Did you ever see that episode of "Deadwood" where the dead bodies were thrown into the pig sty for proper gustatory disposal?  Forget the cute pinkness of the pig from Charlotte's Web.  Seriously.)

Herding Pigs?

Gary hopped out of the boat and walked to shore, under the watchful eyes of the mama pigs.  I really did not want him to get out and told him so.  Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it.  He was carrying the bag of food and the pigs really wanted the food, no matter what.  So Gary put the bag behind his back and walked slowly backwards with the pigs following.  I wanted to close my eyes and just wait for the screams and squeals.  Elliott followed from a distance.

Gary got to the food store area and threw some of what we had brought into the containers, and then I saw him put the bag high up in a tree.  (He later told me that he wanted to keep the pigs from bothering him and figured if the food was not around, they'd calm down.  Yeah, right.)  Well, one of the mama pigs was not having anything to do with that idea and she came up to Gary and nipped him on the butt.  I could hear him yell and he smacked her in the schnozz, dumped the food, and then slowly made his way back out of the woods, onto the sand, into the water, and, seemingly weeks later, into the dinghy, while the pigs watched his every step from the shelter of the shady pines.

That's when I found out about the bite, so we raced back to the boat to clean the wound and put antiseptic on it right away. 

While we were playing doctor on board, another guided boat came along, and that guide had a bigger bag of what seemed like grain that he poured out on the sand.  At this point, we saw two babies racing down the beach toward the mamas.  They were adorable; one was brown and one was striped.  A few minutes later, another mama trundled out of the woods and SHE had three piglets with her, two brown and one striped.  We didn't see any males, but it was obviously a fecund feral family.  As we sailed away from that interesting adventure, we saw the whole lot of them happily nibbling away on the beach.  That'll do, pig; that'll do.