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The corn has been harvested and all the other crops are in bar the sugar beet and winter rape. And with no food on the fields the pigs are now actively coming back onto the baits that we run. Simple maize baits, a shovel in the ground and a handful of maize into the cut and tread it over and a few logs on top. The logs serve two purposes, firstly to get at the maize the pigs have to shove the logs aside and the noise this makes alerts the (often sleepy) hunter to the presence of pigs and secondly from a distance you can see whether pigs have been active and feeding and the bait needs replenishing if the logs are all over the place.

At one particular bait, we had a good sized single pig coming in early the last four nights and chowing on the baits and ploughing the earth for loose maize pips. The first night it looked like a lunar landscape! Such damage! Anyway, this guy was coming in early every night and we decided to sit and try for him.

I took my CZ in .30-06 with Geco 170 grain factory soft points, a Leupold LTO Tracker 2 and a .38 revolver and my son his Sauer Carbon in .30-06 with the same ammo as me and his 9mm Glock.

I would sit at the lunar landscape bait and my son on another bait some 750 m away as the crow flies.

We were on site at 18.30 hrs and the wait began.

19.15 hrs came - the pigs usual feeding time. I waited, scanning the bait area every few minutes with the Leupold. A roe buck came, fed and slowly walked away.

At 19.45 - more or less dead on time - a bright green shape appeared in the Leupold hand held at the edge of the woods. Switching on the Pard on the CZ, I could clearly see the pig. A decent sized pig. He / she came into the edge of the bait site, turned broadside and - after setting the hair trigger - I put the 170 grain round into his/her ear and the pig dropped on the spot. A couple of minutes of kicking and all was quiet.





Dressed out, a 65 kg / 145 lb Keiler (boar) just over 2 years old and with an inch plus of white fat all around! All in all in great condition and certainy one for the freezer!





We were home toasting the hog with a beer and a schnaps by 21.30 hrs!

It's great when they come dead on time!


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Right on Charlie!

Looks like he's holding his hands out for a beer!

George

That's very interesting - those hooves are much more elongated than we see on the feral pigs around here.

Thanks for the photos.

Sounds like some more fun and a good eating pig as well. Be Well, Packy.