FOR Ashton Berdine, a ramble in the woods to dig for the pungent tender-leaved wild leeks known as ramps has been a springtime ritual since he was a teenager. Even today, at 45, as the first buds appear on trees, he takes his family into the woods near his home in Elkins, W.Va., to dig a few ramps to cook with fajitas.

But lately, Mr. Berdine, a botanist with the environmental group the Nature Conservancy, has had to hike deeper and deeper to find ramps, he said. The acres-wide patches that used to carpet the forest floor are becoming elusive. Mr. Berdine has seen areas where every single ramp has been scraped up, he said, as if by “wild hogs rooting in the forest.”

Earlier this month, he caught a glimpse of one of those hogs.

“I pulled up behind a truck at a stoplight,” he said. “And I just saw bags and bags of ramps, piled high in the truck bed.”

Over the last two decades, the lucrative market for ramps during their short early-spring season has drawn a horde of new diggers, who cart them out of the forest in unprecedented quantities. Some see the bounty as limitless, but Mr. Berdine is one of several botanists who think ramp frenzy may be taking a toll.