This “hunting weekend” has so far (with two days still to go) proven to be great, eventful, and full of experiences…
This "hunting weekend" has so far (with two days still to go) proven to be great, eventful, and full of experiences.
I got out to my first night hunt a bit late, and the unfavorable wind direction also worked against me. So the group of 4 young wild boar that arrived after 9 pm — approaching from downwind — left prematurely; all I could make out of them was some disgruntled grunting.
However, the rest of the night around me was full of exciting rustlings, and there was no telling which of them might turn into a visual experience near the feeder as well.
For the next night, I got out in good time, several hours earlier, and set up the lights’ external batteries, then quietly watched and waited for as long as I could.
Oddly, nothing moved, nearby or far off.
The night passed in perfectly uneventful silence.
However, it proved very useful for figuring out the right layering system for clothing.
Because at 6 pm the temperature was still well above 25°C, while by around 3 am it had dropped to only 12°C.
And it’s often not simple to choose the necessary and sufficient clothing across such a wide temperature range.
The last night, though, made up for every failure so far.
I switched the cameras facing the Nagy Zöld wallow to instant image sending, so they’d alert me to any wild boar approaching.
Around 10 pm the big sounder arrived: at least 3 sows, 5-6 last year’s young, and more than two dozen nicely developing piglets.
The big ones rushed at the acorns scattered along the edge of the ditch with incredible greed, while the little ones took over the corn feeder, whose base had already been waiting for them with at least 2 days’ worth of scattered corn.
A huge competition broke out over the acorns, and I could hear a tremendous appetite at work.
However, my mini red-light spotlight running from the stand couldn’t provide adequate illumination at that distance.
While the piglets were lit up by the feeder lights in excellent quality and visibility.
Since I didn’t want to shoot a piglet, I waited, hoping that, as had happened before, the big ones would switch from the acorns to the corn feeder afterward.
Unfortunately, no.
After an hour and a half, they simply, calmly moved off.
They weren’t spooked, they just moved on.
The sounder’s lead sow never went to either feeder. She patrolled in the background. At times she lingered for a long while right beneath my stand, occasionally grunting a little, but she never “sounded the alarm” and gave no sign at all that anything seemed suspicious to her.
The sounder moved on, and I, full of experiences, put the bow back on its holder.
Around 3:30 am a smaller group arrived: two sows and 4-5 piglets.
This lineup seemed odd to me, but it surely had its reason.
Here too, the two larger sows, around 70 kg, chose the acorns, while the piglets satisfied their appetite at the corn feeder.
When one of the sows went after her piglets to the corn, the other stayed at the acorns and lingered a good while longer over what remained from the earlier sounder.
I didn’t know what to do, because I couldn’t see the one at the acorns well, and I didn’t want to shoot the other sow while she was next to her piglets.
Until, finally, as a saving idea, I slowly took down the powerful headlamp hanging within arm’s reach above me and covered the entire lamp head with my palm.
With endless care and slowness I placed the headlamp into the open compartment of the belt pouch hanging on the left side of the stand, positioned so the lamp’s beam pointed in the right direction.
I selected the appropriate spot beam and brightness, then very carefully moved my hand away from in front of the lamp.
And yes!
I saw the wild boar feeding on the acorns beautifully.
All I had to do was wait for it to turn the right way, and then, from a 76-pound HOYT RedWRX Carbon RX4 bow, I released a 536-grain Easton Hunter 4mm Procomp 250 arrow.
I watched the lighted nock streak across the game, then bounce off and continue glowing on the far side of the ditch.
The pig crashed into the thicket, about 50 meters off, and after a few seconds everything went quiet.
The cameras, set to “live” (with the instant image sending function turned on), faithfully tell the story of the night’s events in chronological order.
