Last summer my son and I were rounding a bend in the main berm road at my hunting club in Dorchester County, MD when we both saw several mottled or salt and pepper, dark grey animals dart from the edge of a field, across a ditch and into a wood.
Both of our instant reactions was: HOGS! But our sighting was extremely brief and partially obscured.
We had been hog hunting in TX a couple of months prior, and have hog hunted in NC and SC as well and we'd seen a fair number of hogs in the wild, so weren't unfamiliar with them.
Maryland isn't know for its wild hogs but I learned that there are some "escapees" from a 2013 DNR capture of pigs allowed to run loose on a farm adjacent to a WMA about 12mi from our club. The WMA is on an island, but there is a pretty good size bridge to it and at places the creek that separates the WMA from the mainland isn't very wide or deep, but it is all gumbo mud bottom.
There hadn't been any hog sightings and our caretaker thought we were full of it, but at our request put out some corn and duck pellet bait and set up a game camera. We got hundreds and hundreds of photos over a two week period, but after sorting through several hundred found only photos of sika deer. FWIW, MD sika deer are the smallest sub species or strain of sika, but they are dominant over our bigger whitetails. However, there were subsequent sightings of pigs within a couple of miles of the club from the one and only road that runs past our club.
So, I am left wondering if we did see hogs.
I took some photos of tracks around the summer bait sight which were different from the typical sika deer tracks. Sika tracks in mud tend to show hooves splayed outward toward the front. Whitetails too but less so. We have very few whitetails on this club, sightings are few and far between, but we have a heck of a lot of sika.
Here is a typical sika print:
Here are a couple I have questions about:
Any help appreciated!
JPK
Both of our instant reactions was: HOGS! But our sighting was extremely brief and partially obscured.
We had been hog hunting in TX a couple of months prior, and have hog hunted in NC and SC as well and we'd seen a fair number of hogs in the wild, so weren't unfamiliar with them.
Maryland isn't know for its wild hogs but I learned that there are some "escapees" from a 2013 DNR capture of pigs allowed to run loose on a farm adjacent to a WMA about 12mi from our club. The WMA is on an island, but there is a pretty good size bridge to it and at places the creek that separates the WMA from the mainland isn't very wide or deep, but it is all gumbo mud bottom.
There hadn't been any hog sightings and our caretaker thought we were full of it, but at our request put out some corn and duck pellet bait and set up a game camera. We got hundreds and hundreds of photos over a two week period, but after sorting through several hundred found only photos of sika deer. FWIW, MD sika deer are the smallest sub species or strain of sika, but they are dominant over our bigger whitetails. However, there were subsequent sightings of pigs within a couple of miles of the club from the one and only road that runs past our club.
So, I am left wondering if we did see hogs.
I took some photos of tracks around the summer bait sight which were different from the typical sika deer tracks. Sika tracks in mud tend to show hooves splayed outward toward the front. Whitetails too but less so. We have very few whitetails on this club, sightings are few and far between, but we have a heck of a lot of sika.
Here is a typical sika print:
Here are a couple I have questions about:
Any help appreciated!
JPK
