Blr243 wrote:Well done with the dog Ferris. Is that a deer in the pic ? How often do u use the setting “black hot “? And why ? Any idea why there’s big pigs in your area ? I hunt a place in injune where there’s a high percentage of solo good boars ( never seen a mob of sows and suckers there in my life. Buggered if I know why. ) I hunt a deer dingo block that’s exactly 100 k from home( bris) but the pigs deer and dingoes are extremely thin on the ground ..... it’s ok to post pics of your ugly mug. You have already done it and no one complained.
Yeah mate. That’s a deer in the pic. The property owner wants them gone as they eat the saplings in his orchard. The video is even cooler but seems you can’t load vids on here??
I find I swap between hot black/white all night depending on conditions. I find hot white great for finding pigs/deer/dogs when they’re hiding amongst trees or the thick stuff. The white really shows up. I’ve just started using hot red a bit more as well but it’s only good for big stuff under 100m, even 50m is preferable. Hot black is great for scanning larger areas when you’re sitting still but as I said, I change brightness/contrast and the black/white a LOT throughout a night. Hot white is hard to go past though for finding stuff...
As for big pigs, I think it’s a combo of a few things. No one gets to them during the day at this spot; it’s too inaccessible where they camp, so they are under no pressure to move. (Interesting story on Landline this weekend gone by that debunked the theory that pigs move a lot - they threw a GPS on heap of pigs and found they actually don’t really move a lot UNLESS there’s pressure on them) I’m also the only person that’s has access to the block where they are coming out at night and I also think they’ve gotten so big that even any hunting dogs would struggle to get some of these pigs, but I’m not a “dogger” so I’m only guessing on that one.
Having said all that; I don’t think you can discount thermal in the way we hunt them. As they say, big pigs don’t get big by being dumb and having thermal allows you to see them before they see you (ie, you’d be no chance getting these pigs with a torch - their escape routes are just too close) so I can be pretty selective in taking certain pigs or finding the big boars who usually seem to be on their own.
All this stacks up to a pocket of pigs that haven’t had a lot of pressure over the last decade. You go out west (take anywhere in Australia that’s around 4-5 hrs from the coast, and every man and his dog is literally culling pigs.
Anyway, I’m far from an expert but these theories seem to apply to our haunts and I guess that’s what it’s all about; working out what works where YOU hunt.
Here’s some pics of the honkers recently. There’s bigger than these ones as well; a lot bigger...