Hogs hiding?

O

Old Stony

New member
Any of you Texas guys seeing a decline in the numbers of hogs lately. The past two months or so they seem be be barely moving around my area of East Texas. I have traps out and I shoot them from stands too normally, but lately I am hardly even seeing tracks around the feeders and traps.
I'm thinking maybe the big crop of acorns are keeping them fed deep in the woods or something like that. I have heard it suggested that there might be a disease that has wiped out some of them also, but i don't buy into that theory necessarily.
I started toward a goal of 500 hogs on one property just over 5 years ago and I was stuck at 470 for over a month. I finally shot one from a stand and broke through to 471 but still no real activity. Other guys around this area seem to be having the same problems as me and I was just curious about activity around other areas.
 
I live in College Station, Texas but I hog hunt all the time and the only place I go to hunt at now is around Iola, Tx. Which. Is 30 miles east of College Station. Iola is located in northern Grimes county. It's just 45 minutes or less from Huntsville, Tx. Anyway it's ironic you say that because up in my neck of the woods in the last couple months we have had by far the BEST hog hunting we have had in 7 or 8 years. During that bad 6 year drought we were stuck in from roughly 2007 till the fall of 2013 the hunting just got worse and worse each year. Then last year when the drought seemed to cease (at least for the moment because there is NO predicting Texas weather), but when the drought seemed to cease at the end of 2013 through this past January the hog hunting has been the absolute worst I have ever seen. It got to the point last year when I rarely would even go scouting for sign let alone go hunting. It was terrible hunting. But starting just a couple months ago at the end of January the hunting has been nearly the best ever. In this febuary it has been great an I have been going every chance I get. But like you said they have been only sticking to the deep woods. They are around in full force and the woods are teaming with hogs but there are no roots in any of our pastures. This is very strange. We see tons of footprints in and around the woods and creeks but ZERO sign of them in our pastures. I don't know why they are sticking to the woods so much instead of rooting like they normally do. And I have yet to see any in the open either. All of the hogs and sounders of hogs I have seen since they returned have been strictly in the woods. And I have tried to flush them out but they only circle back in the woods.
 
Can’t say as it has been a while since my last hog hunt but hogs are smart.
You put them under enough stress and they will move to safer pastures.
 
All of my hunting is in Van Zandt county and it's pretty dense woods all around where I hunt, with small clearings where I put feeders and traps. The deer were very scarce towards the end of the season and the hogs were even more scarce. I can still see quite a few acorns on the ground and I know they effect the game animal feeding habits a lot. I'm hoping with this snow and ice lately some of the acorn crop will rot away. I currently have 6 cameras out covering 6 feeders and haven't seen over a dozen pic of hogs in the past couple weeks. The pic's I'm getting are mostly lone boars...no big groups.
The deer are starting to show up again on the cameras, so maybe there is hope. I know a lot of guys would like to see their hogs disappear, but I'm an old retired guy and it's just recreation for me.
 
no expert

Not an expert on hogs by any means, fact is, I'm still waiting to kill one. We just don't have a large number of them in N. AL, as yet. But guys of my acquaintance, USFS and NPS rangers who have lots of hogs on a NF and an NP in an adjoining state tell me that hogs can be hard to put the finger on, and these guys are out there on the public land near daily.

The USFS guy equated them to turkeys in the fall, ranging far and wide for mast/food. Some days their there, some not.
 
I pulled the cards out of 6 cameras yesterday and saw a total of 3 hogs...and these are normally all busy areas around these feeders. Lots of deer coming in right now for corn, but hogs just seem to have moved somewhere. Other guys from our area are telling me they see the same things right now. I can see hogs moving around a lot, but hundreds of sq. miles of hogs just disappearing? I went out and shot one of the boars last night at 6:15 that was coming in and moved to another feeder until 10:00 with no results. By 10:00 the cold and my drooping eyelids were getting the best of me. Maybe I should have started this quest when I was younger.
 
The hogs in this area of OK are feeding mostly on the wheat. IME: When hogs are on the wheat they don't move around much. They lay up in a thicket close to water and the wheatfields.

Evening before last i got a call from the neighbors at one of my hunting properties. There were hogs in the traps. Yesterday morning i got over there, killed and field dressed the 11 adult hogs and 8 pigs. All had been eating wheat.
 
Well, if you hit them hard, expect their local numbers to go down. That is what is desired, right?

A couple of years ago, a few of the guys gave me a hard time because the pigs I was shooting at my place kept getting smaller and smaller as the larger hogs were taken. Now hogs are more like random interlopers than a resident population.
 
Well, if you hit them hard, expect their local numbers to go down. That is what is desired, right?
Click to expand...


......and those that survive tend to be wiser and harder to get. They live by not making the same mistakes their buddies did or move to a safer haunt. Add to that an abundance of naturally occurring food widely and evenly distributed and the game itself will be widely and evenly distributed as opposed to bunched up around the feeders. Pressure is just not shooting animals, but the hunting and the scouting in a given area. Could there be other hunters or predators in the area affecting the numbers?
 
I'm the only hunter on 1,100 acres of pretty dense woods...with the exception of an occasional trespasser in the middle of the night. I have several properties I hunt, and they are all the same right now. I'm not even seeing tracks in the open areas. I don't think this is the result of hunting pressure or anything like that as other hunters in this area seem to be having the same phenomena. My only thought is maybe a food theory. We do have a lot of oaks and the resulting acorns...which I'm hoping will disappear soon. I sincerely doubt they have left East Texas....
 
Yeah your right Stony they haven't left East Texas. I just talked to some of my cousins up in New Boston which is just 15 minutes west of Texarkana and they said that they still have a lot of pigs up there with a population that hasn't seemed to decrease. An down here where I'm at kind of on the edge of East Texas they still are in full effect. And I also think what you said about the acorns keeping them in deep woods is true too because like I said in mmy previous post the woods are the only place I'm seeing them. I'm seeing lots and lots of piglets but nearly all the adult pigs I'm seeing are very very up in size. The smallest one I saw in the month of February was about 180 lbs. And one pack that I came up on in some dense creek bottoms that I was trying to flush out of the brush to no avail. Anyway it was a good size pack of about 25 adults and I don't even know how many piglets, but the smallest adult hog that I saw was probably 200 or a little more and their average weight looked around 250.
 
Since all the rains..we are having lots of activity....The wife put this boar down day before yesterday....They are really tearing up the pastures....
 

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That's a nice hog Keg. And yeah I was scouting yesterday and saw some serious roots in one of our cattle pastures. Also last week I killed about a 250 pound lone boar. But yeah since the rains and the freezes in the last few weeks the acorn crop in the woods has seemed to rot and we are finally starting to get more hog activity in the open like we normally do.
 
We are seeing more activity as well. I got called out of the stand by the landowner last week to deal with hogs at the front of his property, but they turned out to be across the road. They mad a lot of racket and we could hear them a long way's off. So we stalked down to the front of the property only to realize our folly...
https://youtu.be/ZJ3htIBOAFM
 
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