Gave Igor a call for help last night...

JTPinTX

Custom Call Maker
Been getting some serious crop damage on freshly planted peanuts. I killed a 240 lb sow out of the field last week, but over the weekend the damage suddenly really ramped up. A sounder with a pretty high average body weight found the field and was tearing it up. My normal hunting partner couldn't go so I gave Igor a call and he drove down from Amarillo to get another gun on them.

We got out in the field about 10 or so. The wind gave us fits. It kept switching back and forth, changing direction. One pretty decent pig (maybe a lone boar) got downwind of us and spooked. We had to walk several hundred yards across the field one direction, then change direction and make a loop to get wind right for where we expected the pigs to come out.

There is a ravine that lets the pigs get pretty far out into the field before they pop up, and then it seems like they just appear out of the earth. The sounder popped up, the wind was good, and we started our stalk. Started at about 300 yards and stalked up to 85-90. We got set up, got a shooting plan, did a countdown and started hammering.

If y'all have been watching the Night Hunting forum then you probably know about my thermal issue. Basically I was having to shoot using my old digital night vision last night since my Thermal is going back to the dealer and I am waiting on a replacement. Igor was shooting with thermal. I was shooting my 6.5 Grendel suppressed. He was shooting an AR-10 in 308, unsuppressed. Every time he uncorked that cannon it was blanking out my digital NV for a second or so. Even so, we did pretty good I think. We had 5 dead laying in the field, 2 of them nice big pigs. Probably some more dead in the tall grass to the north but we didn't go prowling around looking. Out of maybe 8 adults in the sounder we got 4 for sure and I know we had solid hits on a couple more.

I really enjoyed hunting with Igor, but he is gonna have to send a bribe to ATF to speed up the approval of his form-4 though. Shooting unsuppressed stalking hogs is just uncivilized.
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He knows I was going to give him some grief about that. I had a couple other friends sitting on a different field 2 1/2 miles away. They said they could hear us when we opened up. Well, they could hear Igor, for sure.

One pig with a heart girth measurement of 47 1/2", another with 40". Chart says those measurements give weights of 275 and 200 respectively.

Four different pictures here.

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/gallery/80/full/129876.jpg

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/gallery/80/full/129877.jpg

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/gallery/80/full/129878.jpg

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/gallery/80/full/129879.jpg
 
I gave Igor some grief about the can, but I really enjoyed hunting with him. Very professional, very safe, solid tactics. We had never hunted together before yet it seemed like we just fell right into a routine. When you hunt with someone new you never really know how it is going to go. Generally I am pretty picky about who I hunt with. Igor makes the cut for sure. He is a solid guy.
 
My son put about $3800 of new peanut seed in the ground yesterday (not including diesel of course). That was the third time to plant for some of that field. He checked this morning and there was some damage overnight, but very much reduced from what he had been seeing. He said it looked like just maybe one or two bigger sized pigs. I imagine it was the lone pig that Igor and I saw before the sounder came in. Damage was in that same area where we had seen it.

Looks like I will be sitting over a peanut field again tonight, trying to tie up some loose ends.
 
Went out again Friday night. Storms all around, lightning flashing everywhere. The rain wasn't bad to start with, just spitting a bit here and there. Thermal was still seeing good at that point. Me and another friend of mine (not Igor) stalked down to the end of the field where we expected the pigs to come in. Instead the pigs came up through the same valley they did with Igor and I earlier in the week. We started the stalk from 350 yards.

The pigs were feeding/moving away from us pretty quick though and we go into a bad tail chase scenario. We started the stalk from the NW corner of a 1/2 mile pivot, and by the time we caught them we were on the far east side, across onto the south half of the circle. It turned out to be the remnants of the same sounder Igor and I ambushed earlier in the week. We set up from 80 yards and opened up. My digital NV was having a lot of trouble in the rain by that point. We got 3 of them killed for sure. We think another got put down but in the tall wet wheat cover on the south side of the circle we couldn't find it. And they don't count if you don't find them. The littlest one got away for sure, we saw it make it out of the field.

Long walk back to the truck, rain starting to come down fairly good for the last 300 yards or so. We were soaked. By the time we got back over there with the truck the dew point and temp were the same, air was totally saturated, still raining. Thermal performance was going way down, especially in the corner of that pivot where the wheat cover crop was still knee high and wet. Had a fairly difficult time finding the three we knew were down, and then gave up looking for the fourth. Smaller pigs than last time.

My XQ50 that won't hold zero goes back today, so until my new Thermion comes in I guess I am out of the pig business for a little while. It sure was handy using it as a spotter. Peanuts on all the original plantings are starting to push through the surface so they should be OK now. The replanted areas need 3-4 more days and then they will be past the critical phase. At least for my sons fields. I think we have some others that still need some help.

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/gallery/80/full/130172.jpg
 
Man that sounds like fun. One of my goals is to get in on some pig action some day. I can't imagine having to deal with the damage they do to your crops. Good job on thinning them out.
 
I have been involved in agriculture a good bit of my adult life. I have seen more deer issues in years past in my vicinity than anything. Basically over population, Mother Nature and CWD fixed that.

Hogs are a way different critter. I see all the damage and hear a lot of the complaints. I know folks In Oklahoma and Texas with pretty much the same problem you have. I offered to come down to the Oklahoma bunch with six guys and we would kill what we could for 5-7 days. They were gonna charge us $50 per hog...... I have no problem paying for a real hunt if I have to. But when the pied piper comes to town to rid the city of rats, I don’t get it.
I see it a lot like prairie dog hunting only a bigger target.
I understand there are a small few that have messed it up for the rest of us as far as respect for others property and safety.
 
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