Hi Flowerhog
Glad to hear you found the information useful. You really don’t need to be good at drawing. It’s really just to give you an idea of roughly where on the face there might be a dark area, what sort of shape the mark is, etc. But it is handy to have it as a record, so that when a hog turns up you can check your record – that is until you get used to the hogs markings, which you will do after a while if you are keeping notes.
If you have quite a few hogs visiting – when I was studying the hogs more carefully (over the course of several years) I found that it was the females who visited almost every night except for short periods of time when they may have been having hoglets. So you might find it helps to work out male from female as well. It was the females I came to know best. There were a few males who visited more frequently, but they have larger ranges than the females, so there were some which visited less often – presumably for those, my garden was not in a central place in their ranges.
Good luck with it all. Happy hog watching!
