I’ve been a devout hunter and eater of wild pork for a long, long time. I’ve pursued wild porkers in remote river bottoms of east Texas and the brush country of South Texas and just about everywhere in between. Thanks to a bumper crop of summer pears and squirrels that love to eat them, I now have pear-fattened porker coming to my front yard on a nightly basis and, they are keeping my hours, showing up early as soon as darkness falls.
I hunt hogs differently than most of the guys I hunt. Most are looking for the biggest, rankest boar they can find and long tusk is a big bonus. I do my best to take these destructive hole diggers off the landscape but it’s the fat younger hogs that I like to set my sights on, their ultimate destination being my smoker!
So, what do squirrels have to do with hunting hogs, you are probably wondering. We have a huge pear tree situated about 60 yards out from our front door and each year about this time, it is loaded with hundreds of immature pears. Squirrels climb the branches and feast for several weeks; they are notorious for taking a bite or two from a pear and dropping it to the ground. Wild hogs arrive about this time each year to feast on the pears.
How they know one of their favorite food sources is there I do not know. I have a fifty-yard strip of woods around our four acres which is connected to other properties with trees and brush along the property lines. Hogs can travel the half mile from thousands of acres of ranchland to my place and remain in cover the entire way. I doubt the wild porkers can smell the fruit from that distance and wonder if a few hogs that hit my pears from the previous year remember the location and bring their new brood for nightly snacks of fresh fruit. It’s always sows with half grown pigs and a few young boars that show up. I’ve never seen a big boar under the pear tree.
I live in an area where most properties are five to ten acres; it’s not exactly wilderness country although we’re only a half mile from some remote bottomland where I have access to some really good hog hunting. But why go to the hogs when they are literally in your front yard, right? I wouldn’t consider shooting my centerfire here, although I know the shot would have a heavy backstop of brush and trees. I have a few neighbors living within a few hundred yards and don’t wish to alarm them with a rifle shot about the time they are trying to get some sleep!
I have a brand new Ten Point Crossbow I just sighted in. It’s shooting groups almost as tight as my rifles out to about fifty yards and I’ve been itching to put it to work. I’m making plans to knock down one of the fat shoats that are showing up like clockwork just after dark each evening. I have my Smokin Tex electric smoker cleaned and ready to go to work; the smoke box is already loaded with a few sticks of well-seasoned hickory.
I’m not one to stay up half the night for anything, not even a pork procurement hunt in my front yard! My plan is to back my truck up within about 40 yards of the tree about sunset, get situated in my comfortable swivel share in the bed of the truck, have a cold glass of iced tea within arm’s reach and wait them out. The porkers have been arriving between 9:00 and 9:30 like clockwork and I shouldn’t have long to wait.
Care of the meat has been well planned. I will remove the backstraps and four quarters of my chosen porker and place them in leaf bags and chill overnight in the freezer. I’ll skin and butcher the meat the next morning. This should be one of the easiest hogs hunts ever but the trick will be making a perfect shot that anchors the hog in its tracks. This should be easy to accomplish with the tack-driving crossbow at close range.
I get a lot of raised eyebrows from guys when I tell them I usually hunt hogs from the back of my truck but I have learned that hogs are accustomed to trucks, tractors, trailers, etc. and they think nothing of a big piece of metal showing up on their feeding grounds.
My truck is a rolling hunting blind of sorts that does double duty as a processing facility. I have everything necessary to transform a wild hog into pork, knives, sharpeners, you name it. I obviously don’t always hunt in my front yard, this is somewhat of a treat. When I am out in the woods hunting, I always have my big cooler packed with 20 pounds of ice when hunting in warm weather. If I don’t kill a hog and need the ice, I simply drain the water out of the bag and freeze it for the next hunt.
In an upcoming column, I plan to share some recipes for creating tasty meals from wild pork. There is so much misinformation floating around the internet about eating hogs. The prime ingredient to a tasty wild pork meal is the choice of the hog. I target the young and fat ones although a bigger heathy boar can be good eating as well, it just has to be cooked a bit differently.
Check out my weekly podcast “Catfish Radio with Luke Clayton and Friends” just about everywhere podcasts are found. The weekly very current TV show I do with Jeff Rice and Larry Weishuhn “A Sportsmans Life” can be watched on YouTube or Carbon TV.
