2015 Game Camera Photos

[Ranch Dog]

What are you fellows seeing?

A lot of young buck on mine but I typically do not see the older guys for about another 30 days yet. I do think this buck is handsome and slick...

buck_06.jpg

This hog is at this feeder every morning about 9:00. That is very unusual and tells me he is sleeping with a few yards of it.

hog_03.jpg

This feeder and the area it sits in is one of my favorite spots on my place. Upon my death, I have it in my will that I'm to be cremated and time dispensed from this feeder. Figure I will let them have a go a me for a change.

[62chevy]

Time to thin the herd RD.

[Ranch Dog]

Time to thin the herd RD.

Hahh! The buck needs at least another year and as long as the boar doesn't start digging, I'm going to let him ride. One thing that I've noticed over the years is that when you get a resident boar, you don't have a bunch of sows and their sounders tearing everything up. Big boars are territorial and I know they will gobble up the little ones so the sows keep them away.

I have two boars on opposite ends of my place and I haven't had hog issues this year so I'm probably gon'na let them ride and test my theory to see if they will do their part.

Years ago, I had a big hog like this one hanging around the house and it was pretty cool to see him out and about in the daylight. He never messed around with anything other than the eating under the feeder. At one point, I noticed I hadn't seen him during the day and I never saw him again. I actually missed him. The hog in the picture is about 300 yards from the house and I've seen him a couple of times about 5:00 in the morning under the yard feeder. It might just be me but I think him to be a handsome fellow as far as hogs go.

[mr surveyor]

RD, I think you may just be right with your theory concerning the boars. It just might be that a couple hundred dollars worth of "supplementary corn" per year will save you many hundreds of dollars more per year in "damage control".



jd

[62chevy]

Never thought of the RD but then I have never lived on a ranch before either.

[Fyodor]

Time to thin the herd RD.

Big boars are territorial and I know they will gobble up the little ones so the sows keep them away.

Very interesting. I wonder if this is also true for their European cousins... because usually the European hunters learn to shoot the large males, and let the females go. The asumption is, that a leading female will keep the smaller ones from breeding too early. When I have a look on the wild boar population, I doubt this argument is valid. If you want to reduce a population, you need to take out the young and the females anyway, killing males would just result in more females per male, but not less offspring.

[Maximumbob54]

They are supposed to be smart. I wonder if you really can train one well enough that it would only do minimal damage and keep the rest of them away. That would be pretty crazy for farmers.

[Ranch Dog]

Time to thin the herd RD.

Big boars are territorial and I know they will gobble up the little ones so the sows keep them away.

Very interesting. I wonder if this is also true for their European cousins... because usually the European hunters learn to shoot the large males, and let the females go. The asumption is, that a leading female will keep the smaller ones from breeding too early. When I have a look on the wild boar population, I doubt this argument is valid. If you want to reduce a population, you need to take out the young and the females anyway, killing males would just result in more females per male, but not less offspring.

I think it kind of depends on what the management goal is. Usually with a game animal, the goal is to sustain or grow the population. In that case a certain level of protection is afforded to females and young males. I started hunting feral hogs late in the 1960's and there wasn't many and most hunters wanted to see additional opportunities to hunt them so you tended to favor boars over sows. Here in Texas, some fifty years later, the goal is now eradication.

If you are a large ranch, you build better fences to keep them out and then you put helicopters in the air to kill the ones you have. The killing is indiscriminate. Ten years ago it was just the "get in the air" part but what has been experienced is that if you don't prevent others from coming in, all the killing just creates a "black hole" that sucks others in. Basically, you create unoccupied habitat and it will be sought out and filled.

I've seen the same thing happen with coyote hunting especially when eradication is the goal. In fact, there is a saying here in South Texas; "if you kill a dominate male, six other fellows attend the funeral". That, happens pretty fast. Every middle aged male is looking for country to call home whether it is a coyote or a hog.

I've worked the eradication pretty hard and heavy for near a decade and it doesn't work in that my place has a barbed wire fence around it. If I'm not willing to do the fence, all the killing in the world will not keep others from flowing in. I still kill or at least send a bullet after every sow I see but I thought I would test the dominate male theory and see if they would do it for me. Very early this year, I had the family groups here so I tightened up pretty hard and they moved off. What took their place, by chance, was these boars and I've left them be. So, in a way, I'm testing Maximumbob's theory (though I haven't taught them anything) and working along the lines of the guidance provided by the coyote funeral parable.

I did have a pair of young boars show up, back in July I believe, and over the course of three weeks I killed both of them. No doubt these two fellows were looking for a place to call home and I didn't want them challenging the dominance of any of the reigning monarchs. The bottom line is that I had a quiet summer and didn't have to spend my nights out in the brush following hogs. I do think that something will happen, the peace cannot last. One will wander off or get killed when he is on a neighbor's place and then it will create a sucking black hole. I will just have to see what is pulled in and hit it accordingly.

Maximumbob will understand this from his participation on Rossi Rifleman. I've really had to control myself concerning either of the two boars I see as I really would like to try the R92 chambered in 357 Mag on one of them with my 190-grain bullet.

[Fyodor]

Interesting information, thanks a lot!

Huntin in densly populated Germany usually follows a bit different rules. In most areas wild boars became pests, and cause large damages. Especially our large and growing corn fields are magnets for boars. In Germany we got a licence based hunting system, so the hunter responsible for the area has to pay for the damage "his" game causes. So most hunters try to reduce boar population as much as possible. Wiping them out completely would be illegal, but most hunters and farmers wouldn't mind if it happened.

[62chevy]

RD sounds like you need a way to entice boars to stay and if one is lost to attract a new boar.