A Saturday evening game of patience

After the work I did early Saturday morning at my wildlife management setup, the day naturally ended with a hunt from the stand.

The weekend hadn’t started off lucky to begin with: after covering about 200 kilometers, I realized I’d left my cold-weather stand pants and my boots at home.
The chaos of the previous day, the early morning start in the dark without a flashlight… I won’t even go into detail.
That’s how it goes sometimes.
The Hubertus Iceland stand pants stayed by the couch, and the boots stayed in the flowerpot in front of the garage (I didn’t have a free hand to open the trunk, so I set them down there, and there they remained).

Luckily the night was mild, so the soft, fuzzy hunting vest I hadn’t used for my layered top clothing worked great as a thigh and knee warmer.

Midnight had already come and gone and nothing had happened.
Literally nothing.
At times like this, I set my trail cameras placed along the game trails in the area to instant image capture/sending at one-minute intervals.
Not one of them sent anything.

Nearly four more hours of quiet, meditative solitude followed, until finally the roughly 80 kg boar arrived, which had been a regular visitor to my feeder over the past few weeks.

Hunting wild boar from a stand, especially a boar, is always an exercise in extreme patience.
For him, the concept of "time" probably doesn’t exist.
He can wait as long as it takes, it doesn’t matter to him.
Only one thing matters: safety, survival.
This time was no different.
At first, only a few distant, very faint rustlings of leaf litter and tiny snapping twigs betrayed that "game is moving in the woods."

Wild boar, especially boars, are extremely cautious when approaching a feeder.
I waited motionless for sounds to reach my field of view from the direction indicated.
This was when the thermal camera came into its own.
Everything is right at hand, ready to be picked up with the slightest motion.
At first it showed nothing.
Tilting slightly right, then slightly left, I finally managed to make out a tiny heat spot from the boar, which stood for long minutes at the edge of the feeder, hidden behind a large tree.

Earlier, even before sunset, he had begun working on the leaf litter pulled out to the edge of the feeder area, methodically rooting through it.
This part of the area, however, remained hidden by trees and bushes, so there was no chance of a shot there.

On the thermal camera, though, I could clearly see him feeding peacefully and calmly.
I could even hear the sound of him contentedly munching away.
While continuously monitoring with the thermal camera, I switched on the feeder light closer to him from the Sidus Link app, setting the light to an infinitely faint red glow.

He didn’t notice!

Last time, it was as if a coiled spring had launched him – he’d bolt at the slightest change in light.
Another 15-20 minutes passed, and I saw that from where he’d been rooting in the leaf litter, he was gradually, slowly working his way further into the interior of the feeder area.

Still watching through the thermal camera, with a gentle motion, extremely carefully, I increased the red glow of the light by just a few percent.
The boar, during his slow steps, once he saw that he’d come out of the safe cover of the bushes, ran back under the trees. He stopped, and didn’t move for 5-10 minutes.
Neither did I dare to.

Then he started rooting around again and venturing further out once more.
And I tried to "coax out" just enough light that I could see him without the thermal camera.

He repeated this back-and-forth pacing at least four times over the course of the next nearly an hour. (photos)

Not once did he cross that line of shadow and just-barely visibility.
And the illumination of the feeder area, even with a great deal of goodwill, only just barely reached the minimum light needed for a shot.

Maybe next time.