An unconfirmed report of a wild boar sighting in the Point Reyes National Seashore has some experts dubious, but other locals perked their ears. Earlier this month, a resident ran into a man hiking on the west side of Mount Vision who said he’d seen what he believed was a wild boar just 10 feet away from him. The man, who did not offer his name, claimed to have seen disturbed earth and tunnels in the grass; he backed away slowly and hightailed it from the scene. When officials got wind of the report, seashore spokesman John Dell’Osso said his “ears went straight up.” Park wildlife ecologist Dave Press went out to search for evidence but, after hiking the area and examining various wildlife trails and tracks, he determined there was nothing out of the ordinary. “I’m sure this guy saw something, but I can’t confirm what it was,” he wrote in an email. Wild boars, a feral subspecies descended from domestic pigs and a European species introduced to California in the 1920s, are common in Sonoma and Mendocino and have a presence in 56 of the state’s 58 counties. They’re known for tearing up terrain, including lawns and urban landscapes, and, often, for aggressive behavior. Marin’s population started in the mid-70s. By 1985, their population, which was concentrated in the southern part of the county, numbered at around 250. But Mr. Dell’Osso said that even when the population was at its height, the pigs never got west of Highway 1. “We were unscathed back then, dodging a bullet,” he said. Concerned over the impacts of “rooting,” whereby the pigs dig up the ground in search of roots, bulbs and worms, several land management agencies instituted hunting and trapping programs. In a multi-million-dollar joint effort, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Marin Municipal Water District and Audubon Canyon Ranch set up 28 miles of fencing to facilitate trapping and hunting. Fences went up in the late ‘80s along the Bolinas Ridge, preventing the pigs from moving west. “We were deep in the hunting effort, and then, suddenly, we couldn’t find them anymore,” Mike Swezy, the watershed manager for Marin Municipal Water District, recalled. “It’s very hard to totally eradicate them, but for some reason, Marin had a success. The pigs were naturally isolated by the peninsula, so it was easier to trap them. It also could have been that because they were inbreeding, they stopped reproducing—that was a theory.” The last wild boar sighting in Marin was in the early ‘90s. Yet the Bay Area continues to struggle with populations, including in San Ramon, San Jose and Castro Valley. Hunting, one of the most successful management strategies on private and some public lands, eliminated around 4,000 individuals in California from 2015 to 2016, according to the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Mendocino and Sonoma Counties saw among the highest numbers of kills that year. Jesse Garcia, a senior environmental scientist with Fish and Wildlife, said the recent North Bay fires and the resulting loss of habitat could have led an individual to migrate to Marin. Still, Mr. Swezy said he was “dubious” about the report. “It’s more likely that it was someone’s domestic pig that escaped,” he said, though he admitted that wild boars look quite different from domestic pigs, with their long, dark hair and large tusks. If the park service were to find a wild boar, Mr. Dell’Osso said, it would “remove it immediately.”