Shoat Down, Circling Coyote, Flying Squirrel

[Brian Shaffer]

I returned Monday night to the campground area of Elk Springs Ranch, the high fence property that had some hogs manage to gain entry into it. I stayed from just after 1800 to 0230 hrs. While I only got into hogs once, I heard hogs several times throughout the evening. I tried running the caller to bring in the hogs, but no luck there. The caller was more helpful with a coyote, but all he did was to circle completely around me and then never commit. The really neat observation of the evening was watching rodents scurrying about the trees, that turned out to be FLYING SQUIRRELS. I have never seen these in the wild. I would be scanning the woods and I would see one just glide through my field of view. I saw 4 flights or so before I finally caught one on video.

 

[gshock]

Slowly taking down the herd! Good shot and good vid!

 

[der Teufel]

Clearly, you need to get SlayerBeall out to collect some twofers with you and start knocking them down several at a time!

Saw flying squirrels once in East Texas (Davy Crocket Nat'l Forest). One of the 'permanent residents' / Campground Volunteers would put out food at evening time and he attracted 15-20 of them. He had a floodlight set up and they were swooping around everywhere! Really very interesting. They are indeed neat to watch.

SlayerBeall !! LOL

Use guise sleigh mi, eye loaf yore vids !

 

[WhoCares]

Brian, have u seen the sow or any other large boars? You think this might be the last of the them? Just curious

 

[Brian Shaffer]

WhoCares, there are more. My first night there, I saw 3 adult-sized hogs (sows?) and 4 juveniles (<100 lbs each) and one massive boar. I could not shoot at any of them because they were intermixed with fallow deer. As I tried to move to get a different angle, more fallow deer would come into view. The next night, I saw a single hog cross an open area and it was ~125 lbs. Later that night, I killed a 150 lb boar.

Visit number three killed the first shoat out of the group down at the campground and last night was another kill.

Last night, I also heard the grunts and squabble noises from what I assume were adult hogs off in the distance, but they never came into the small area I was watching.

The property is a tough hunt. Of the 800 acres or so, I would estimate that >650 are forested with <150 up top on the escarpment that is pastures and the rest is hillside, valleys, and more trees. Areas such as I was watching have less than a couple acres of open area. Resources up top include pastures to root and graze, oaks, persimmons, etc. All of the water is down below in ponds in the numerous valleys and such. So, limited views and dispersed resources across the property. It is hard to pick a particular area. On top of that, I have yet to even begin to explore the north end of the property that has the least improved/maintained roads.

 

[Ratdog68]

Yup, time to put that girl to work again. Clean eye-popper shot, very nice.

 

[scrmblr1982cj8]

Awesome video!

 

[WhoCares]

Wow, that's going to require some work to clean that property out. At least it will be fun work