I have a property where the landowner said the hogs were rooting up his winter wheat. I checked the field and found a few small spots of rooting, but then found that some of his randomly scattered oak trees were rooted in a ring around the circumference of the tree, pretty much matching the overall shape of the tree's canopy. If a tree has a big, circular canopy, there was a big, wide circle of rooting on the ground. If the canopy was offset to one side, the ring rooting was offset of one side. So what I want to know, is why is the hog rooting in this pattern? What is it after? These are oaks and there are acorns under them, but not just as nice canopy matching circles under the trees, but all over under the trees, as you would expect. I found 4 trees with these rings. I found a couple of other trees with the random patchy rooting that I would normally expect.

This appears to have been done by a single hog as there was a single set of tracks leading from tree to tree.

There is more moisture in the soil on the outside of the drip line of the Live Oak. Probably more grubs and insects in the moisture.

Porcine crop circles......

You may be right. I did look at (and feel) the soil and could not tell that it was any more or less moist than the soil around it, but without a hygrometer, the difference would have to be fairly significant for me to tell and even then, what the conditions were at the time of the pic may not be what is beneficial to the grubs/bug/whatever.

Bar-D, are you suggesting that the hogs are aliens????

Maybe the hog has one leg shorter than the other.

Lol. Should be easy to trap them if they are just making circles like that.

May be after Cicada grubs.

Just a theory I have........

Lots of worms, grubs, and other sub-surface insects in (& below) the root system. The drip line is easiest place for the hog to get into and under the roots. Closer to the tree and the roots are too large, and too much work to dislodge.

This time of year I would suspect they are after acorns as other food is hard to come by right now in some places.
If it happens year around then it's probably grubs/worms/insects.
They seem to lose their minds digging where I have fed round bales to my cattle in the past to get to the grubs.

This is my guess also..

They do like their grubs. Not hard to see why...as some of them represent a substantial meal. This time of the fall we find some really large ones under logs and old hay bales.

Now I don't know much about grubs, but those are freakin' huge! Those are cicada grubs?

Catfish love them too!

Gonna have to try that!
Here is one from underground where we fed roundbales last year.
Not sure exactly what they grow into but we have a healthy crop of rhinoceros beetles here in the spring/summer.

I believe these are the larvae of the Hercules Beetles we have around here.

I'm uncertain the timing of their maturity but in the Fall and Winter months it is easy to find them in any decaying matter. In particular under old hay bales and rotting logs. I believe the reason for that (at least in part) is that the decomposing material creates and gives off heat which is attractive to them.

Hogs will move some impossibly big logs to get at them. I find them when moving hay bales or cutting up an old tree that has been on the ground for a long period.

Other types of grubs are much smaller than these. It isn't unusual to find dozen or more under a hay bale (or what is left of a hay bale). And that same number under a rotting log. Well worth a hog's effort to get to them.

You learn something new every day.

Those grubs are huge!

Those things are mounters!

They get bigger, the one's I posted are just average size.

Here is an internet pic of a larger one:

There are always pictures of bigger ones on the internet...

Have tried many many times to catch fish on them creeks lakes ponds etc. never had a nibble. lol

We always called them rhinoceros beetles because the big horn many have. At least that is what my dad always said they were from. We always found them under our wood pile at the house outside san antone.

There are a lot of similar beetles and sometimes names are used interchangeably, but this is the beetle I most often encounter.

https://texasinsects.tamu.edu/eastern-hercules-beetle/