Hi Greg,
After hurricane Matthew hit the whole SE seems to have taken a hit. One nearby rifle property normally tags 600 deer, they did less than 200 this year. As much griping as I heard from rifle hunters in town, it seems nobody left their stands over corn feeders to really hunt them.
Given the info, I did a lot of scouting early last week and confirmed there is a lot of blow down in the swamp and still acorns available. One hunter observed hogs using the trails in and out of his feeder to get from one oak tree to another while walking over corn to get there. A couple other guys had them come in to the feeder in the last minutes of daylight.
Given that info, here is the plan we generally ran:
1) Since it was so cold at night we waited for the temperature to start to rise and stalked the swamp in areas between swamp feeders. We bumped a lot of pigs and had some opportunities. I let down on 3 of them for different reasons and came back without a hog because of it. I'm good with that, I'd hate to pass through one and wound another.
2) At 4:30pm many guys would sit feeders in the swamp until the last bit of shooting light. A few guys put their headlamps on their bows or clamped them to stands to try to milk out a few more minutes. I'm not sure if it helped or hurt them.
3) Tracks, sign, and cameras showed predictable activity in the swamp, but generally not on the hill. If I were hunting next week, the first night I would man the line between Sam Rice and Cohen's Bluff Field. Andrew will be able to show you on the big map.
4) YOU HAVE TO GET OFF THE ROADS. You will see fresh tracks on them everyday in the swamp, but if you are stalking the wind you have to do it in the heavy cover between the roads. Many of the hogs we saw were >100 yards from any road.
5) Warmest part of the day and right at dark we had almost all of our sightings. Early morning and late afternoon they seemed to die down.
Note: for anyone searching the archives in the future, this seems to be a pretty unusual set of circumstances to me. Trust your own scouting and observations. I'm just trying to help out the guys in the next hunt or maybe two with not wasting time on areas that are currently not showing hog sign. Usually this time of year it's 180 degrees different with feeders and stands on the hill be by far the most productive.
I didn't see a bug until Friday night (warmest day) but then I was swarmed hard by some kind of little white gnat and mosquitoes. It's been generally warm all winter, we just hit the cold snap.
All total we saw just over a hundred, several shots were passed, a few shots were taken, and for a few reasons only one hog made the trip to the cooler. Shoot me a PM if you want to talk on the phone before you go.
Thom
Topic: Wild things update? (Read 684 times)
