Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Game Camera pays off!!!

We've been watching all sorts of hogs with our digital game camera, but havent seen anything during the daytime in months. If it wasn't for the camera and the tracks, you would hardly know there were wild hogs on our land.

Eddie

This morning he made a mistake.

Eddie

Bravo!

Guess you found one thing to get their minds off the catfish! Looks like a nice shot, too...

Ummm. Lots of pulled pork. Good work, Eddie and kids.

Eddie, nice shot (or was it your wife who took the shot?).

Nonetheless, how are you planning on preparing it for the upcoming PB meeting?

The menu is really coming together!!! Crappie, Wild Boar, Bluegill Sandwiches,....

do it again

do it again

mmmmmmmm, fresh bacon and fried catfish....what more could one ask from their land.

Dude that hog is a HOG! Good shot! What did it weigh?

Donnie

He wasn't near as big as the last one my wife shot!!! This is her third hog.

Eddie

dang thats a lot of bacon. do they do anything to your pond or do they wallow somewhere else?

There were four of them at the feed again last night. One boar that we've nicknamed Z, thats about the same size as the one I shot. There is a red spoted boar we call Tigger who's quite a bit smaller and two sows. One looks pregnant. Sometimes there is two others with that group, but we only saw the four.

They travel the same trails most days and never stay on our land. The ranch on two sides of us is 240 acres, and the land on the other side of us is 460 acres. There are lots of places for them to hang out and be safe, but our place has the only clearings, pastures and feeders.

There are tracks where they had drank out of the pond by the house, and the Lake, which is down aways from the house. There is a hole where I took out a big oak tree that is half full of water along there trail that they wallow in. There is also a dry sandy area that they also wallow in. Close by are several trees with the bark rubbed smooth from them scratching there too.

What sucks is they are rooting up around my trees be the Lake. I saved those trees to make it pretty there, and they have dug down as much as two feet in areas. I smoothed it out the other day in hope the grass will grow. There are all sorts of duck tracks over that area now, but no hogs have tore it up again.

Eddie

That one with your wife lloks like Hogzilla. I wish we had wild pigs here in KY, it would be neat to hunt them.

Donnie

DonJovi,

Be careful what you ask for! Trust me, no one WANTS wild hogs. The damage they do is to great and they breed wayyyy to fast.

Your comment reminds me of the first ranchers that made 'em, when they mixed our domestic swine with Russian Wild Boars for hunting purposes...

Dude, let's breed these two together and we can hunt 'em.
Dude, that's righteous. Then let's let them out and others can share in our creation.
Dude.
Dude.
Sweeeet.
....meanwhile, back on the ranch...
Dude, our land is sooo torn up and our valuable deer and waterfowl are sooo few.
Dude, my corn and soybean fields are rooted all to hell. I am ruined.
Dude, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to create those things.
Dude, I think your right.
*Camera pans away* Audience sees wild boars for miles, and soon takes over each of the states with no reasonable predators to control their numbers.


Alright, I am done. Don just come out to most any state from MO south. We have a few in IA you can have, that have started making their way up here. I'm just giving you a little joshing..that's all...Exotics are never good though... :p

Dang things showed up on my land last Spring and are 100% nocturnal. They wallowed enough to make a neat little forage pond absolutely useless. It is now mud soup. I drove in some T posts on the deer feeders to keep them from turning them over. They dug up the T posts on one, turned the feeder over, mangled the lid, tore up the timer, and got to the corn. On the others, they just turned them over and bent up the barrels and the timers. I now have the T posts driven in at an angle alongside the feeder legs and triple wired. They have been digging at the T posts that I set to wire my game cams to. I've taken the game cams in and don't know about their future. I was amazed to find that they had been digging around the legs of a tripod stand. Surprisingly, they are grazing my wheat patch food plot like cattle and are rooting it very little.

I have 2 traps that they won't go in but don't mind pushing them sideways to get to the bait. Those traps are heavy; real heavy . More T posts coming.

I have day leased my place twice on weekends but nobody has seen a hog. There are tracks everywhere and last weekend they showed up after the hunters had given up about 2:00 A.M. How do I know? They dug some more around 2 feeders.

I read that they are the 4th most intelligent species after man, apes and dolphins. I'm not sure that they aren't smarter than me. So far they have whipped me pretty badly. My 8 year old Grandson and Partner is the only one that has shot one. We smoked it and it was pretty dry. Good pork is pretty inexpensive so I'm not too impressed with them as a food source.

They do come out during the day, but not very often. I was told that there body doesn't have any way to cool itself and they will die if they overheat. Thus the reason they are primarily nocternal. They can't handle the heat.

Here's a few pics from last year of them out in the open.

Eddie

Eddie those little ones are the best eaten, smoked whole on the grill.. Do you have a hog trap?

Another disadvantage to them being mosly nocturnal is they get hit by cars. A hog is much more solid then a deer, but they are lower to the ground an don't cause as much damage. I see more hog road kill along the roads then deer. But Armadillos are still number one!!! hahaha

Eddie

No hog trap yet. Been thinking about it, but we're actually worried about it being too successful. What do we do with them if we catch them? It's illegal to sell wild hogs without shot records. They fall under the same laws as domestic hogs and if your caught selling wild ones, it's a huge nightmare. We killed 6 last year, missed three and had oportunites at least two dozen other times that we didn't bother with.

We did have one hog that discovered the bird seed in our front yard. She started rubbing on our pine trees and I saw her tracks in the yard less then 25 feet from our front door.

I rigged up a motion sensor that would turn on a shop light that I hung on my bedroom window. In the middle of the night, the hog would walk past the sensor and the light would shine into my bedroom. It woke my wife up, who sure as heck woke me up!!! hahaha

It usually showed up around midnight, or just a little later.

The first time I tried the front door. Nope, scared it right off. Nothing for a few days, but then it was back. This time I tried the back door and snuck around the house. It smelled me or something, because it was gone when I got around the corner.

Third time I was ready. It took another few days, but she came back. I took the screen off our son's bedroom window and had it unlocked. Luckily it was a Friday or Saturday night. I'm not positive. The kids were exited about the hog coming back, Steph was terrified of it, and I was having doubts on wether I could kill it.

The kids were asleep when the light turned on. I woke them up, told them to be quiete and then I shot it out the bedroom window.

We were up for a couple hours after that, but nobody was tired!!!!

Eddie