For a bowhunter, there’s little better confirmation that one is doing something…

For a bowhunter, there’s little better confirmation that one is doing something right than this:
It’s already a fine achievement if, on an open hunting ground, with a game population traumatized by every conceivable aspect of wildlife damage control – a population that, because of the rifle-hunting community armed with “technology,” has “neither night nor day” (as the saying goes) – one manages to remain unnoticed within the animals’ zone of perception, right in their immediate vicinity, for an extended period of time.
And the icing on the cake is doing all this in the presence of a fairly large, “extended family” sounder.
Where countless noses, with a sense of smell many times more refined than an average anthropomorphic biological organism’s perception, and ears sharp enough to be extremely sensitive to any “out of place” sound (and every self-respecting wild boar has two of those…), keep watch alertly in every dimension of the space, across an area the size of half a football field.

Not a bad result, all things considered.
Well, last night was exactly that kind of confirmation for me.
At 22:30 the big sounder arrived (at least 3 sows, 4-6 last year’s young pigs, plus at least two dozen little striped piglets).
It was interesting, because this time the “big ones” just patrolled around, or lay down in the dense brush, in cover.
One even lingered under the stand, sniffing and sniffing, this one too, that one too, but none of them sounded the alarm.
The sows stayed in the background as well.
The little striped ones – one of which stood out for being remarkably small compared to the rest – rushed the corn and stayed there at the feeder for a good hour or so.
They fed, rubbed against things, dozed off, chased each other, played.
One of them seemed to be struggling with some breathing difficulty, because it was breathing quite oddly, its flank contracting forcefully.
Soon after they arrived, I already activated the feeder light, starting with the faintest glowing red light and then gradually increasing its intensity, to the point where I could even put the thermal camera away.
I didn’t need it.
Anyway, even at the lowest brightness it dazzles the eye, and it takes long minutes to readjust to the darkness again.
Since they spent more than a full hour at the feeder, I had the chance to experiment with every shade of the light: which one disturbs the game, and which one lets me see the most detail at the lowest intensity. And indeed, I settled on red light.
The reddest red there is.
Any shade of green was completely unsuitable (for me).
At some point, on some cue, the piglets suddenly ran over to the acorn feeder.
They clustered together in a small area, all 20-odd of them. (No matter how many times I counted, I got a different number every time. They were constantly bustling about. Just when I thought, “well, finally,” I’d counted them all, one or two more would pop out from under the bushes).
They busied themselves at the acorns for a good quarter of an hour or so, then went back to the corn feeder again.
Then, well after midnight, the whole sounder moved off calmly, and the feeder emptied out again.
I would have liked to take one of the young pigs for the kitchen, but they, along with the sows, refused to show themselves.
/ It’s quite possible they still sensed the harvest from a day and a half earlier, and that put them on heightened alert. /
No young pig fell, but I came away richer by another unparalleled experience.