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# Thirteen peccaries, one boat ride, and a forest that needed them back
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/peccaries-home/
- Published: 2026-09-05T19:58:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T08:55:29.000Z
- Description: For sixteen hours in late August, a herd of white lipped peccaries travelled by truck, by boat and finally on people's shoulders into Piedras Blancas National Park, where the forest has been missing them for eighteen years.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Rewilding, All stories

*Celebrating all of our amazing fathers this Father's Day, with love from all of us at Earth to Sea News.*

White lipped peccaries are the gardeners of the Central American forest. A herd moves through the understorey like a slow plough, turning and airing the soil, carrying seeds in its droppings, digging the wallows that fill with rain and become tiny worlds of their own, and feeding the jaguars that keep everything else in balance. Piedras Blancas National Park on Costa Rica's Pacific coast had lost its herds about eighteen years ago, and the forest had been quietly poorer for it. So after nearly a decade of preparation, a team from Osa Conservation set out to bring them back from the Osa Peninsula across the water. Thirteen animals walked into a corral near Piro, three males and ten females, all healthy. Then began a relay of more than twenty people: pickup trucks to Puerto Jiménez, a boat across the Golfo Dulce lent by a local lodge, and the last two kilometres into the park carried by hand to a soft release enclosure. Veterinarian Dennise Ortiz Angulo says the crossing felt like the film Life of Pi, and that inside the crates the herd kept up a low chorus, each animal telling the others it was still there and still all right.

Four days later the peccaries were feeding in the open, and within a few weeks the first satellite collars were on so the team can follow where they wander. Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, Osa Conservation's executive director and a former environment minister of Costa Rica, calls the move medicine for the forest of Piedras Blancas, and says his generation worked on stopping the clearing while his children's generation will work on putting the wild back. It has the neighbours with it: of three hundred and thirty five people surveyed across thirteen communities near the park, nearly three quarters supported the return, and more than half saw visitors coming to look for the herds. Rewilding manager Guido Saborío and field biologist Allan Brenes hope to build the group to twenty five or thirty, the size at which a herd starts to hold its own. Somewhere under the canopy this week, the floor of the forest is being turned over again.

Sources and links

Our short take: the full story is by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay (27 August 2026), with photographs there by Ian Rock. Photograph here: Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, a wild herd in Brazil, the same species.

- [Osa Conservation](https://osaconservation.org)The rewilding team behind the move.