Predicting hog behavior and movement

MD1005

North east FL
I have a question for all of you that hunt pigs at the same places frequently even daily. Are lunar phases and moonlight a factor in patterning behavior and movement of hogs? Just curious because I jump to different spots alot and really haven't developed a strategy on
Predictability. Sometimes they do what I think they will sometimes I'm surprised. One spot I saw them almost daily in a year ago has been completely void. I'd like everyone's thoughts on patterning them and what works for you.
 

Ratdog68

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Them hogs lurk here daily, and plot accordingly. Evil bastages, they is.
 

TEXASLAWMAN

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I use a app on my phone that shows the most active feeding times. It seems to be fairly accurate.
 

pruhdlr

Cantonment,Fla.
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IMO.....Hogs are hard to pattern because they move over different areas more frequently that most other animals. The guys that have the hardest time with hogs are the long time,hard core,deer hunters. Hogs are different in many different ways. Now,given that,I also do believe that hog behavior is somewhat different in different parts of the country.

Here,the hogs move around in close knit sounders. Where you find them today,they might not be tomorrow. This...especially in the non-deer hunting months when there is not corn slingers going off everywhere in the woods. OR....in the states management lands(WMA)where baiting is not allowed.

I get pictures of hogs on my game cameras that I have never seen before all the time. This past deer season(in Feb) a big nasty boar hog was killed on my club that weighed over 400lbs. Nobody had ever gotten a picture of him before he was killed.

The hogs are where they are. Read up,study up,talk to seasoned hog hunters,put in your time in the woods,try different attractants. Everything will come together,and you will soon start to see somewhat of a pattern.

But foremost remember.......a pig lives in the barn yard...a hog lives in the woods. --- pruhdlr
 

MD1005

North east FL
IMO.....Hogs are hard to pattern because they move over different areas more frequently that most other animals. The guys that have the hardest time with hogs are the long time,hard core,deer hunters. Hogs are different in many different ways. Now,given that,I also do believe that hog behavior is somewhat different in different parts of the country.

Here,the hogs move around in close knit sounders. Where you find them today,they might not be tomorrow. This...especially in the non-deer hunting months when there is not corn slingers going off everywhere in the woods. OR....in the states management lands(WMA)where baiting is not allowed.

I get pictures of hogs on my game cameras that I have never seen before all the time. This past deer season(in Feb) a big nasty boar hog was killed on my club that weighed over 400lbs. Nobody had ever gotten a picture of him before he was killed.

The hogs are where they are. Read up,study up,talk to seasoned hog hunters,put in your time in the woods,try different attractants. Everything will come together,and you will soon start to see somewhat of a pattern.

But foremost remember.......a pig lives in the barn yard...a hog lives in the woods. --- pruhdlr
Good info thank you. I'm trying to get access to a few more spots that I can get on more consistently. I have several good spots but I don't get out there enough to really guage where ill find them. Where I live I usually just walk around till I find them. There are no shortage that's for sure. The lease I hunt borders the Nassau WMA there are new pigs on the cams all the time.
I'm after a big ol black and white sow from a sounder I had come across last time I was out. She could smell me and wasn't coming out Into the open where the corn was. eouldnt leave the tree line Couldn't get a clear shot too much brush in the way. I'm heading out thee again this week. Like you said time in the woods is the only way. 48 pigs have been killed on the lease since February
 

MD1005

North east FL
Oh and on reffering to them as pigs, I've always heard them interchanged down south. I usually refer to smaller ones as pigs out of habit. I always thought hog meant bigger pig and both were barnyard terms haha. I see I did it again in referring to the death toll this year.
 

Boar Buster

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This works for me. If I want to shoot hogs in the daylight I go 2 weeks after the full moon. The hogs around here will be most active just before dark for about a week. As time gets closer to the full moon stage they start coming out later and later. It works for me. I will also have good luck hunting hogs on cold drizzly days.
 

TEXASLAWMAN

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The app I use is called Best hunting times. While hogs/pigs don't hold to a pattern. I have found this app to be pretty accurate for all grazing animals. I kept a log of every hog I killed date, time, place, bullet used, DRT not DRT, sex, and weight up until this year when my phone crashed loosing all the data. Been so demoralized about it I have not started back keeping records. But when I had it I went back with this app and checked against it there were a higher percentage killed in the feeding times than the non feeding times.
 

Ratdog68

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The app I use is called Best hunting times. While hogs/pigs don't hold to a pattern. I have found this app to be pretty accurate for all grazing animals. I kept a log of every hog I killed date, time, place, bullet used, DRT not DRT, sex, and weight up until this year when my phone crashed loosing all the data. Been so demoralized about it I have not started back keeping records. But when I had it I went back with this app and checked against it there were a higher percentage killed in the feeding times than the non feeding times.
Might your data have been saved to the SIM Card for retrieval?
 
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Afalex1

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As far as moon phase goes I have always spotted and killed more hogs when the moon is half or less. Whether I am night hunting or early morning hunting, less of a moon seems to keep them moving more in my area. However, I have read about other guys having more luck on or around full moon nights. I think it just depends on what the sounders in your area prefer.

For me, with night vision, I get excited about a cool to down right cold night with 20-50% moon, no clouds, and a good 10 mph North wind. It seems to get the hogs moving the most on the properties I hunt. On nights like these I have shot a few out of one sounder in the orchard, collected the dead, and then turned to watch another sounder come rushing into the orchard! Nothing like multiple sounders within 10 minutes of each other.
 

TEXASLAWMAN

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I used to do better with full moons but I think most of the stupid ones are dead!
 

MD1005

North east FL
Right on. I'm going out this week time permitting. I usually don't see them come out until around 8:00pm then again at around 11, then 3. But this is mostly based off camera pics and its sporadic, at one feeder location. The times are usually the same but it's not everyday. They also come from different directions, same group i keep seeing. i had them come up behind the stand last week with the wind blowing my scent right to them, i had Been anticipating them from the opposite direction based on the my buddys info from the week before. Good info guys.
 

TEXASLAWMAN

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They typically try to move with the wind in their face if there has been any hunting pressure. So if I'm going to be static and watch one spot I will pick a position at least 100 yards back with the wind blowing across the attractant (feeder, water hole). Then get behind them and stalk in.
 

MD1005

North east FL
I am going to be on the move alot more now. So much easier to make decisions based on conditions as they change. I learned pretty quick that being stationary is a disadvantage.
 

TEXASLAWMAN

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I am going to be on the move alot more now. So much easier to make decisions based on conditions as they change. I learned pretty quick that being stationary is a disadvantage.

Depends on a lot of things. Land size is a big one. This weekend I was hunting a 800 acre section of property. I walked most of it the first night the second night I sat up on the watering hole. Sometimes you have to keep them guessing ;)
 

Afalex1

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I know they always keep me guessing. Changing your own patterns is a must! Hogs learn very quickly and if you don't adapt they will win every time.
 

EGarza04

El Sauz, TX
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MD: I have yet to see any data from scientific publications that tie moon phases or other environmental conditions to Feral swine movements. That doesn't mean they are not correlated, it just means that if it is it has not been measured. They do of course have some specific habitat requirements (habitat being Food, water, shelter, and space). Make sure to exploit the fact that they do need standing water, and regularly travel from bedding sites to feeding sites and watering sites.

Home ranges vary significantly from one ecoregion to another and also vary with land uses, hunting pressure, and other esternal stress factors. Just like any other animal, not all will come to feed, feeders, or feeding sites so cameras will not capture all individuals of a population.

TLM: If your the data you lost was on an iPhone then you should have a backup of it on whatever computer you regularly connect it to. iTunes backs up the entire phone every time you connect it to iTunes. All of the backups are stored in a folder on your computer that is accessible, but not easy to find. If you run an internet search on how to find the backups you should be able to get some instruction on how to find them pretty quickly. There are some computer programs that can read and extract the info from the backup files as well, but I think you have to pay for the software.

Here is how to find the backups: http://osxdaily.com/2009/09/11/iphone-backup-location/
Here is one of the extractors you can use to access the data I found while running a quick search, (I have not used this extractor): http://www.reincubate.com/labs/ipho...e-backup-extractor-screen-shots/file-menu.png
 

Brian Shaffer

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Sorry I am late to the thread, but I just joined the forum.

I have only been after hogs since 2008 and my place is fairly small, but bordered by other rural property, and I now hunt on multiple properties. On my place which is all of 46 acres, I run anywhere from 7-8 game cameras at any one time. Even with that many, I don't always know when the hogs have been to my place and so they are actually there more often than I realize from the cams based on the damage that I see occurring. I have kept written accounts of every one of my successful hunts and have correlated them with everything from weather to season to moon phases. Here is what I have learned over these last few years.

Pretty much anything that anybody has told me that will work for knowing when hogs will be around or baiting hogs to be in sooner, more regularly, or staying longer is all just wishful thinking and happy correlations. I mean no offense to anybody, but I have tried a myriad of tactics and used other people's scheduling as well as my own and nothing seems to actually work. I blame the fact that my hogs in my area of north Texas are not starving to death and depending on the feeder to make it through the day or night in order to survive. The hogs here are healthy, comfortable, and are free to make numerous consumer decisions about what they want to do at any given time.

I looked into wind speed as an issue and believed for about 3 years that wind was a factor. It wasn't. I just didn't shoot many hogs during the first 3 years and as it turned out, most were not during particularly windy nights. I have not shot many hogs during windy and VERY windy nights. This sort of result is what leads me to believe that a lot of people's claimed correlations for hunting success because of some sort of noted pattern is likely a sampling issue more so than a bona fide pattern.

Storms - supposedly the hogs move just ahead of the storm or just after storms. I am sure they do. I have shot them then. I have also shot them when there were no storms. I am sure they move just about any time. Just because a storm is or is not coming or has or has not passed does not change the fact that the hogs want to eat each and every day. Be it in the wind or storms, hogs may alter their behavior to be places during those conditions that they prefer, such as in the bottoms, in the woods, in clearings, etc., but they are going to be somewhere and doing their thing. The question is whether or not you are where the hogs are, not whether or not they are apt to be moving. When they aren't bedded down, they are generally moving.

Solunar schedules and phone apps - neat stuff. I know folks that swear by them as noted above. The funny thing is that there are a variety of solunar tables out there for which you can identify virtually any day or time of day that is predicted to be good depending on which version you choose to examine. Depending on the solunar tables I have used, I have shot a lot of hogs during periods where I should expect a very low chance of having an encounter.

I have shot no moon to full moon and in looking at the moon pattern, I have more shot hogs during moon phases that are longer, less for those that are shorter. Go figure. That is pretty much random chance patterning. The hogs eat regardless of what the moon is doing.

Temperature changes - same as storms. Hogs are going to be moving regardless of the temps. The question is then one of when they will be moving and whether or not you will be there at the time they choose to move. I have found no correlation that just because the temperatures drop that all of a sudden hogs start showing up on camera at my place, be that crossing through the fences, in the food plot, or at the feeders.

Scheduling - My wife suggested that I give hogs inexpensive digital watches for Christmas last year to help reduce my frustration at the hogs not showing up on time or as expected. Apparently, hogs do not wear watches or use day planners. I have seen hogs come at the same time for several days in a row, every other day, every third day, and then seen them change their time or stop coming all together for no apparent reason. On several occasions, I have shown up several hours early before when the hogs might return based on the documented schedules shown from the game cameras only to find that they hogs were already there when I arrived or arrived within minutes of my arrival. Those have been some of my shortest hunts. :)

For a while I had exceptionally good luck (for me) hunting based on when my mother-in-law would show up to stay for a night or two, often with no more advanced warning than a couple of hours. She would show up and so I would go hunt about an hour after she arrived regardless of whether or not there was any indication on the property or from game cameras that I had hogs. While I know not of the witchery involved, my MIL could come, I would go hunt, and shoot a hog when none had been there in weeks. I was batting about .250 based on her random visits. Then she moved to town and that scheme fell apart.

Based on MY experience, the only thing consistent about hogs is that they are inconsistent. They continually do things that are not expected.

I will say this about general behavior, however. A sounder of sows, shoats, and piglets, maybe with a boar or two tagging along seems to have a herd mentality in many cases...which means the IQ level of the group is like that of a MOB and reduced to the lowest common denominator. They often make considerable noise, are less afraid, and more apt to return to a location where one of their members have been shot than what you would get when hunting a lone boar or small bachelor group (usually no more than 2-4 individuals). Single boars and bachelor groups tend to be quieter, more skittish, and if you shoot one from the group, the rest of the group is not as likely to return that evening. I have never shot a hog during a significant downpour and I have only had a very limited number of pictures of hogs during rainstorms on my game cameras, though they don't seem to have a problem being out during light rain or heavy fog. When it is really hot, they are less apt to move during the day, but as the summer continues and they get used to the heat, I will probably end up with a couple of hogs making daylight appearances sometime in August or September, probably not the middle of the day, but then again, I virtually never have hogs in the middle of the day anyway. My hogs tend to be crepuscular and/or nocturnal.

Find what you think works for you and maybe it works for you, for a while, in your general area, for your circumstance, with your particular hogs. Hopefully, you will find something that works well for an expended period of time, but don't count on it. However, what works well for you in your situation may not work for me in my situation in any sort of replicable manner and vice versa. That is the nature of hogs as I have discovered and continue to discover.
 
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