Well, Barry and I made it home safely the other night. We are now into our catch up mode but I wanted to make time to weigh in on our Texas Pig-Gig saga with a summary of the five weeks. Texas....the only place on earth where the word "corn" is a verb! There were so many great folks. A fun time was had by all. I won't name them all, as the list is too long and I don't want to neglect anyone. Suffice is to say we had great groups of very skilled and experienced bowhunters having tons of fun, which is what this passion is all about in the first place as far as I'm concerned. You Tradgangers seem to have as much fun in camp as in the field. The skill level shown in handcrafted gear was obvious. Superb bows, arrows and quivers, beautiful knapped stone points, handmade knives and sheaths(thanks Rob), tooled leather of all sorts, great food and good cooking mixed with Texas dust and a little blood made for many memories. The biggest difference this year had to do with drought conditions. Many waterhole tanks, ponds and drainage puddles were completely dry. Green grass was minimal. Fresh rooting sign and fresh wallows were very rare. Heavy dust and wind was constant. Temperatures ranged from a low of 18 to a high of 96 degrees. Several days hit highs over 90. Most of the pig movement was nocturnal. At first we blamed it on the moon but it never did get any better even with the new moon. It wasn't for a lack of pigs except for hunt three. I took four trail cameras. It was very frustrating to see dozens of hogs caught on IR film with little movement seen during daylight. I'm not smart enough to post photos here but if anyone wants to try, send me an email and I'll forward some pix. Some of the monsters I got on film would bring night sweats. Some of the stories have been told here already but I thought I'd share some of my own personal highlights. On the last night of the 4th hunt, I was in a tree watching three doe whitetails and an antlered buck work toward me. The buck carried only his left five point antler. He stopped less than twenty yards from me, then shook his head violently to throw his remaining antler high in the air. It was the first time I ever witnessed a buck actually shed. What got me was how far he threw it. The antler reached an arch apex of probably twelve feet high before hitting the ground no less than twenty feet from where he stood. It did not just fall off his head. If I was a buck, I know I would have walked over to check out my own head gear but he just walked past me, passing right under my tree. I only wish I would have got it on film but dust kept my camcorder in its case. Twenty minutes later, I suddenly heard a hawk scream directly over my head, then hit something on the ground about sixty yards from me behind some brush. There was a lot of heavy wing beating on the ground for several minutes but what he nailed was out of my sight. I suspect it was a squirrel or possibly a turkey but no other noises came from the scene to give me a clue other than the wing beats. Just before dark, with three coons chowing down, the silence was broken again when six spotted hogs of about 100 pounds each absolutely ran in to the corn I had thrown in front of my treestand. I was sorting pigs out to pick a spot on a broadside hog when a huge black form drifted in from the left. THE MAN had made his entrance. I slowly swung over, drew and sent a Woodsman through his heart. He crashed off the river bank and made it about 75 yards before sending a loud thud to my ears. What a great ending to a hard week's hunt. One other highlight came the first week when I actually caught a whitetail buck casting an antler on my trail camera. Get this...the photo was very blurry due to movement but the antler was frozen in mid-air probably 8" above the buck's head. To make matters even worse, I accidentally deleted the photo. To make matters worse still, when I went back to get the antler, it was gone. I figured a coyote or coon must have carried it off until two weeks later when I watched the second buck throw his shed antler twenty feet or more. I never thought to look in the tall grass twenty feet away. I suspect its still laying there twenty feet or more from where the buckstood. One other incident happened that surprised me. On the fifth hunt, I was hunting a pond Woody was kind enough to share the location of with me after hunt two. Just at dark I could see five decent sized hogs walking toward me from the east end of the pond. Suddenly I looked down to see what I thought was eight loaves of bread eating my corn. I figured them to be piglets with no accompanying sow but when I lifted my binoculars in the low light, I discovered not piglets but eight full grown ducks chowing down on my corn. Here comes the pigs closer. This could get good. The ducks held their ground. When the pigs got just feet away, all eight ducks stretched their necks and flapped their wings like mad ganders, actually running the pigs off! What a bunch of pansy pigs! You'd think a duck would be no match for a grown pig but I was wrong. I also need to apologise for the fiasco with the third hunt on the Mobo Ranch. This is the first time we ever contracted a ranch without first visiting it to check things out. We were lead to believe by Bob Zaiglin (the wildlife biologist) that it had lots of hogs and had never been commercially hunted. It was "a deer operation with hog problems." I have to say the facilities, the ranch itself and the ranch personel were all great. There were just no hogs. As someone previously noted, we discovered helicopter census data from October 2008 that counted 61 hogs on 10,444 acres. Then they shot some of those remaining last deer season. Trail cameras showed one small group of identifiable hogs making the rounds to each feeder nightly. The ranch foreman said we could come back to hunt free (why?) Its easy to say "thats why they call it hunting" but as I told the man, you don't open a fishing lodge on a lake with no fish in it. Barry and I will try our hardest to get some money back for those who hunted. The sad part is that we had guys drive from Cleveland, Ohio, northern Michigan, northern North Dakota, etc. and not see a single pig all week, which is more than a shame. Anyway, except for hunt three, things went well, we had good but hard hunting, bad weather and poor habitat conditions but plenty of pigs on all but the third hunt. We'll try harder next year. Hopefully Texas will get enough rain between now and then to get things back to normal.
Topic: Wensel Bros pig gig (Read 7423 times)
