BOOM THWACK and into the bush she ran.
Have vid. Off to find her.
Have vid. Off to find her.
Off to find a sow
- Thread starter Brian Shaffer
- Start date
Found her. Good sized adult female, 150 lbs, not with milk. I believe she may be the one that busted me last week as she was the biggest of the group.Turns out, she did not run anywhere. Just could not readily see her behind high grass. Her sounder mates are apparently what I heard off in the brush.
Story to come later, but here is the video.
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Great kill. It's always good to take the bigger sows. IMO they pass "leadership" of the sounder from one to another. The rest of the sounder will be somewhat susceptible to being stalked and killed until another sow takes over and openly displays leadership. Then there is a learning curve. Get after them ASAP.
May I please ask,what NVD do you/did you use ?? --- pruhdlr
May I please ask,what NVD do you/did you use ?? --- pruhdlr
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Nice very nice! Can't wait to see the rest fall!
This is a first draft. I keep these accounts for my records. Usually I do them right after the hunt, but had a busy morning. Please pardon the typos and I will try to fix them when I recognize them later.
Cellular Sow Hunt 7 Aug 2013
Last week I got busted by a sounder of hogs at my place and while they did come back, it was only once where they made it to the cellular game camera that notified me that they had returned.. I had tried for them three additional times with no luck. So I offered to help out at my buddy’s place, TBR, about 12 miles NW of my place, Horn Hill.
It has been a slow week for hunting success. After being busted by the sounder, I had broken a toe and so was hindered in walking, but it was much better now and I could once again wear boots. So I hiked out to his furthest stand with the notion that I could hunt both ways, checking other feeders and water holes on his property. It was a very warm evening in the upper 80s, no moon to be seen, winds out of the SSE at 10-20 mph. For three hours in the stand, I watched a doe and two raccoon dine at the feeder. So I hunted my way out and was off the property before 12:30 am.
The nice thing about hunting his place is that my place in Forestburg is on the way home. It was when I was passing my place that I realized I had not notified him of leaving or the lack of results with the hunt, so I stopped off outside the Forestburg Store to send him a text message. In the middle of the message, the phone vibrated with a new email that turned out to be from a cellular camera watching a feeder where I had previously seen the sounder. Sure enough, the image included two hogs. So I zipped around to my place and came in on the far east side of the property which gave me the better of the viable approaches to the feeder given the current conditions. I would come in well north of the feeder on the north side of my property.
It was roughly a 450 yard trek from where I parked, first crossing down into the fairly deep ravine that bisects my property and then the last 300 yards or so were all up hill to the pasture where I hoped to still find hogs. This was a likely choice as with previous evenings, hogs would show up on camera for upwards of 3 hours time, but all piglets and shoats which had led me to believe the sows were missing...until I got busted by the sounder. This evening would reveal why the hogs were hanging around for so long and why there were no sows.
As I reached the eastern most edge of the north pasture, I turned on the video recorder on my rifle, checked to see that all was up and running, had the illuminator on, and things dialed in for what I expected (which was wrong, BTW). Here I should point out that the landscape isn’t terribly friendly especially at night. The slope and north pasture are part of a highly fragmented limestone outcrop complete with large rocks that seem to mysteriously grow from the ground at random locations that break the shear pins off Brush Hawgs and provide ever changing trip hazards, especially at night. The weeds and grass help to hide them. So I am excited, going up hill, adrenaline pumping, and I am trying to cover as much ground as quickly as possible without making noise and without tripping over any of these blasted rocks.
I get about 20-30 yards into the pasture and have risen up enough on the hill to start seeing down the other side over the grass and weeds with my thermal scope and I see about 15 glowing blobs, different sizes, only one is moving and it is a small one. They must be rooting. I proceed another 10 yards or so and check the view with the rifle I can see hogs but just barely. I am breathing too hard, heart pounding, adrenaline going, and can’t hold steady on the hogs that are probably 80 yards away for the big ones, though some of the little ones were a bit closer. I should use my shooting sticks, but they are in my truck....back in Denton.
I spend the next few minutes stuttering further up the hill, taking kneeling positions for shots several times only to discover that the grass is just too high. However, the hogs are ASLEEP! The hogs have come into my north pasture to sleep. There are a couple moving around and I kept hearing noises off to my right which may have been a hog in the woods, but mostly they were all bedded down. And I thought this was very interesting. I have seen videos where they are bedded down and it is cool weather. This was a hot night and they are in the lower swale of the pasture where the winds come through and are all spread out. My thought here is that they have found a cool, breezy spot to sleep and are definitely not bunched up for warmth. So if they are bedding down in my pasture, that would explain the long series of images of small hogs coming to my feeder, youngsters feeding intermittently as the majority of the sounder was sleeping.
I continue moving NW along my fence line, looking through the rifle scope at the hogs and catch my elbow on the barbed wire fence. I don’t feel any pain, but it turns out that what I thought was sweat running down my arm was not sweat.
Up and down until I finally have a kneeling position where I can see the largest of the sows in the group. As I am looking at her, I see her eyes are open. She may be resting, but she isn’t asleep. I have a good view and decide to not risk going the additional 20 yards to my tower stand which would offer a better shooting rest, but maybe at the expense of getting busted again. Several times now I have failed to not take the first available good shot, hoping for better hogs, a better shot, etc., only to lose the shot all together. Stationary targets are always better than moving targets.
BOOM THWACK SQUEEEEEEL. I cycled the rifle and start scanning and the hogs have disappeared just that fast. 20+ hogs and they are all gone in 2-3 seconds, but I can hear them crashing through the brush to my left and to my right. As I hear ongoing noises that seem to be stationary to my left, I assume my sow has run there. I don’t immediately see her in the thicket with the NV or the thermal and in my haste to get to the hogs have left my flashlights back in my vest in my vehicle. Instead of searching without a flashlight, I opt to let her bleed out in the woods while I get the car and drive around to this side of the property.
I ended up parking about 20 yards from where the sow had been shot. Armed with a 1911, flashlights, and my thermal scope, I scan the field and see a glowing spot. Turns out my sow didn’t move or didn’t move far. She was on her side in a low spot that I could not see from up on the hill.
She was shot further back than I intended, but as she was nicely quartered away, the bullet blasted through her liver before exiting. From the video, it looked like I pulled the shot which would explain the POI. Based on the size and condition of the exit wound, the bullet did not appear to have expanded.
As I dragged her over to the clearing by my vehicle, I feel something snap in my toe. Crap. I will not be dragging her again. I limped around and got my photographs and then opened her up for the scavengers and checked to see her reproductive status. She was not pregnant and was not with milk. Her stomach was full of green, grasslike foliage and large, fingertip-sized, whitish, rubbery chunks of some other plant material that I did not recognize in its masticated condition.
This was the second hog I have taken from this group, the other being a small boar.
Stopped off at Walmart on the way home for the Tollhouse cookies to celebrate. The kids were were happy this morning.
150 lb. Sow
Remington 788 .308
70 Yards
Silver State Armory loaded 150 Nosler Accubond
Pulsar N550 Digisight
**** Torch Pro IR Illuminator
FLIR PS-32 thermal spotting scope
Cellular Sow Hunt 7 Aug 2013
Last week I got busted by a sounder of hogs at my place and while they did come back, it was only once where they made it to the cellular game camera that notified me that they had returned.. I had tried for them three additional times with no luck. So I offered to help out at my buddy’s place, TBR, about 12 miles NW of my place, Horn Hill.
It has been a slow week for hunting success. After being busted by the sounder, I had broken a toe and so was hindered in walking, but it was much better now and I could once again wear boots. So I hiked out to his furthest stand with the notion that I could hunt both ways, checking other feeders and water holes on his property. It was a very warm evening in the upper 80s, no moon to be seen, winds out of the SSE at 10-20 mph. For three hours in the stand, I watched a doe and two raccoon dine at the feeder. So I hunted my way out and was off the property before 12:30 am.
The nice thing about hunting his place is that my place in Forestburg is on the way home. It was when I was passing my place that I realized I had not notified him of leaving or the lack of results with the hunt, so I stopped off outside the Forestburg Store to send him a text message. In the middle of the message, the phone vibrated with a new email that turned out to be from a cellular camera watching a feeder where I had previously seen the sounder. Sure enough, the image included two hogs. So I zipped around to my place and came in on the far east side of the property which gave me the better of the viable approaches to the feeder given the current conditions. I would come in well north of the feeder on the north side of my property.
It was roughly a 450 yard trek from where I parked, first crossing down into the fairly deep ravine that bisects my property and then the last 300 yards or so were all up hill to the pasture where I hoped to still find hogs. This was a likely choice as with previous evenings, hogs would show up on camera for upwards of 3 hours time, but all piglets and shoats which had led me to believe the sows were missing...until I got busted by the sounder. This evening would reveal why the hogs were hanging around for so long and why there were no sows.
As I reached the eastern most edge of the north pasture, I turned on the video recorder on my rifle, checked to see that all was up and running, had the illuminator on, and things dialed in for what I expected (which was wrong, BTW). Here I should point out that the landscape isn’t terribly friendly especially at night. The slope and north pasture are part of a highly fragmented limestone outcrop complete with large rocks that seem to mysteriously grow from the ground at random locations that break the shear pins off Brush Hawgs and provide ever changing trip hazards, especially at night. The weeds and grass help to hide them. So I am excited, going up hill, adrenaline pumping, and I am trying to cover as much ground as quickly as possible without making noise and without tripping over any of these blasted rocks.
I get about 20-30 yards into the pasture and have risen up enough on the hill to start seeing down the other side over the grass and weeds with my thermal scope and I see about 15 glowing blobs, different sizes, only one is moving and it is a small one. They must be rooting. I proceed another 10 yards or so and check the view with the rifle I can see hogs but just barely. I am breathing too hard, heart pounding, adrenaline going, and can’t hold steady on the hogs that are probably 80 yards away for the big ones, though some of the little ones were a bit closer. I should use my shooting sticks, but they are in my truck....back in Denton.
I spend the next few minutes stuttering further up the hill, taking kneeling positions for shots several times only to discover that the grass is just too high. However, the hogs are ASLEEP! The hogs have come into my north pasture to sleep. There are a couple moving around and I kept hearing noises off to my right which may have been a hog in the woods, but mostly they were all bedded down. And I thought this was very interesting. I have seen videos where they are bedded down and it is cool weather. This was a hot night and they are in the lower swale of the pasture where the winds come through and are all spread out. My thought here is that they have found a cool, breezy spot to sleep and are definitely not bunched up for warmth. So if they are bedding down in my pasture, that would explain the long series of images of small hogs coming to my feeder, youngsters feeding intermittently as the majority of the sounder was sleeping.
I continue moving NW along my fence line, looking through the rifle scope at the hogs and catch my elbow on the barbed wire fence. I don’t feel any pain, but it turns out that what I thought was sweat running down my arm was not sweat.
Up and down until I finally have a kneeling position where I can see the largest of the sows in the group. As I am looking at her, I see her eyes are open. She may be resting, but she isn’t asleep. I have a good view and decide to not risk going the additional 20 yards to my tower stand which would offer a better shooting rest, but maybe at the expense of getting busted again. Several times now I have failed to not take the first available good shot, hoping for better hogs, a better shot, etc., only to lose the shot all together. Stationary targets are always better than moving targets.
BOOM THWACK SQUEEEEEEL. I cycled the rifle and start scanning and the hogs have disappeared just that fast. 20+ hogs and they are all gone in 2-3 seconds, but I can hear them crashing through the brush to my left and to my right. As I hear ongoing noises that seem to be stationary to my left, I assume my sow has run there. I don’t immediately see her in the thicket with the NV or the thermal and in my haste to get to the hogs have left my flashlights back in my vest in my vehicle. Instead of searching without a flashlight, I opt to let her bleed out in the woods while I get the car and drive around to this side of the property.
I ended up parking about 20 yards from where the sow had been shot. Armed with a 1911, flashlights, and my thermal scope, I scan the field and see a glowing spot. Turns out my sow didn’t move or didn’t move far. She was on her side in a low spot that I could not see from up on the hill.
She was shot further back than I intended, but as she was nicely quartered away, the bullet blasted through her liver before exiting. From the video, it looked like I pulled the shot which would explain the POI. Based on the size and condition of the exit wound, the bullet did not appear to have expanded.
As I dragged her over to the clearing by my vehicle, I feel something snap in my toe. Crap. I will not be dragging her again. I limped around and got my photographs and then opened her up for the scavengers and checked to see her reproductive status. She was not pregnant and was not with milk. Her stomach was full of green, grasslike foliage and large, fingertip-sized, whitish, rubbery chunks of some other plant material that I did not recognize in its masticated condition.
This was the second hog I have taken from this group, the other being a small boar.
Stopped off at Walmart on the way home for the Tollhouse cookies to celebrate. The kids were were happy this morning.
150 lb. Sow
Remington 788 .308
70 Yards
Silver State Armory loaded 150 Nosler Accubond
Pulsar N550 Digisight
**** Torch Pro IR Illuminator
FLIR PS-32 thermal spotting scope
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Yep. Every family has traditions. I just figured out a way to help make sure nobody complains about me hunting. The daughters love waking up to the smell of daddy baking cookies!
Sometimes I have to buy milk on the way home as well, LOL.
Sometimes I have to buy milk on the way home as well, LOL.