How to Bowhunt Midday Hogs

I used to hunt midday mostly to get my money’s worth, but I’ve since encountered situations where it’s the best way to kill a pig. In some places, even with feeders and food plots, wild hogs are abundant but nocturnal, either due to hot weather or intense hunting pressure. If you want to get a hog under those conditions, the answer is to wade right into the areas where they spend the warmest portions of the day.

Determining where hogs bed isn’t difficult. Sign points the way, but bedding areas are normally made of the nastiest, thickest cover available. Every habitat offers unique challenges. I’ve hunted Deep South properties – central and southern Florida in particular – where the entire world seems to be thick, unbroken bedding cover. South Texas and its oceans of mesquite and prickly pear are often like this, too. In West Texas Caprock country, where I’ve killed most of my hogs over the years, huge swatches of shin-oak or blueberry juniper (cedars) offer nearly unlimited hog cover. The only real answer is covering plenty of ground and finding sign like blunted hoof prints and dog-like droppings to reveal current haunts. 

Hunting this cover isn’t easy, especially during the off-season when heat and humidity soars. It’s infuriatingly slow-going and noisy. It isn’t where you would have any real chance of slipping into range of a wily whitetail. But hogs are relatively heavy sleepers, and mature hogs have few natural enemies. Even human predators are reluctant to enter such nasty areas. It’s common to slip up on a pile of hogs in this jungle-like cover. They don’t seem to expect to be bothered in these nasty-thick places; that’s the very reason they’re there in the first place. 

In other regions, isolating bedding cover is easier. In Southern farmlands and the edges of the West Texas South Plains, creek beds and brush-choked canyons hold hogs. During the warmest months, hogs seldom venture far from water, either. In northern California, for example, hunting around springs and along live creeks typically results in more hog sightings. On Texas hunts I generally find regular success still-hunting wandering creek beds, looking for remnant pools or muddy springs where hogs drink during dry seasons, and wallow and rub.   

The only real way to move through the stuff is slowly and carefully, sometimes crawling on your hands and knees for hundreds of yards, stopping frequently to listen. On the place I used to hunt in North Texas, the sand plums of late June and early July were a boon, as hogs camped out in those thickets and could often be heard crunching the seeds between strong jaws. The plums, in particular, were what inspired most of the serious crawling, as they were so thick that hog tunnels were the only passages through them. I’d often encounter hogs at distances measured in feet, and in quarters tight enough that drawing a bow was out of the question. Some of those behemoth boars were downright reluctant to give way. A shoulder-holstered hand cannon or 1911 proved ideal in these situations. You couldn’t miss.

On average, though, most hogs were found sleeping, so it paid to glass thoroughly every step of the way. I once located a lone boar because of his loud snoring. In other instances, hunting in pairs, we would jump a sounder of hogs and, confused by the intrusion, they would scatter and offer multiple shots.

Though compounds have certainly become more compact and handier in tight quarters, I leave mine in the truck when jungle stalking. Bedding-cover shots are generally intimate. Anything farther than 15 yards will have an insurmountable amount of brush in the way. Even the shortest compounds still have brush-snagging cables and accessories.

I prefer a fast-handling recurve, like my 52-inch Cascade Nighthawk (a short bow that shoots like one much longer) or Bear Archery’s 60-inch Kodiak (an excellent point-and-shoot model). I choose mid-weight (10 gpi) but stiff carbon arrows loaded up front with 100-grain brass inserts plus 125-grain heads, or standard inserts and 210-grain broadheads. For pure practicality, powerful revolvers (I like .44 Magnum or .45 Long Colt) can remain holstered to leave hands free for fighting brush and crawling.

Editor's note: Patrick Meitin's The Predator and Varmint Hunter's Handbook includes hog hunting and more. 

More Realtree predator hunting. Follow Realtree on Facebook.