Bowhunting pigs around Australian swamps

Joined
Feb 8, 2017
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Location
Australia
Hi everyone,

I want to start contributing more hunting stories to this forum as all I tend to do at the moment is hang around the photography section. The section for live stories doesn't really suit as I don't tend to post a lot while I'm out hunting, so I flicked a message to one of our mods and he suggested I put my stories in here for you to read. I hope you find it interesting seeing content from the some different environments to what you may be familiar with, in the same way I love reading about your hunts and hope to get over there one day.

Last weekend I went out for a quick morning hunt to a place not far from me known as the Macquarie Marshes. My mate has access to a cool property that borders some National Park and it's essentially a section of land in the middle of nowhere where a river basically fans out and creates a big natural wetland. It looks very similar to some of the big swamps in our Northern Territory where you may have seen pictures of water buffalo, but it's nowhere near this area.

Here are some pictures and a few words about how it went down.

While we were primarily there to bowhunt, we got to the property late the night before and decided to go out with the spotlight for a look to try and get some easy kills before the next few days. Here is my mate sitting with a few critters from that night, and my Sako L461 in .222.


We woke up the next morning and drove as far as we could without getting bogged and started walking through some of the swampy areas. Getting around this property is difficult depending on how much water is around, so we often have to walk a long way to get to the spots we know hold pigs. We're in the middle of the worst drought in history at the moment but there is a dam a few hundred kilometres up river from this property and they regularly let water out of the dam so the marshes are kept in good condition for all of the local wildlife.

A few pictures of walking around, looking for pig sign.


Trying to avoid getting our feet wet.


It didn't take long for us to just walk through the water to make things easier.


We spotted a good mob of pigs in some thick lignum but we never got a chance for a shot. We spooked some kangaroos in their direction, and we also had a chopper fly over us which tends to spook the pigs as they are regularly culled from helicopters in this area.




We walked into the lignum to see if we could catch up with them but it's far too thick to be able to effectively hunt without good dogs.


 
Fresh sign.


One of my mates started crawling through some young eucalypt and managed to get a shot away at a little pig.

Some of the blood trail.




His arrow went straight through and lodged in a sapling.


The pig.


We decided to leave that area and walk across a big open plain to get to another section of marsh that we knew would hold pigs. By this stage it was fairly late in the morning but due to the water everywhere and high numbers of pigs, it's not uncommon to come across them at all hours of the day.



My mates saw a cat in this fallen over tree so we got a shot away.


I understand some of you may think this is a bit odd but cats are responsible for many of our native wildlife heading towards extinction.
 
We kept walking towards the big section of marsh.


As we got closer, there was more frequent sign of pigs digging everything up.


This cow has seen better days.


My mates pushed right into sections of the marsh and I followed them and got some cool photos.






We came out one side of it and found a sow feeding out in the open.


 
My mate got a shot away and I got it all on video. Pretty awesome!

I took this photo of a good pad while I was walking up to them with the sow on the ground.


The arrow lodged in her off-side shoulder blade.


I got a selfie with my new hat while my mate was trying to pull the arrow out. We cut her open to help her decompose better and also see if she was carrying any piglets.


We wanted to avoid walking through water on our way back to the car so we found a big weir and went through this crap instead. I reckon the water was easier! Haha.


Thanks for reading, everyone. I'll try and post a few more stories up in the coming days, as I'll be out hunting a fair bit over the next 2 weeks and won't have time.

Cheers.
 
Potentially, mate. Besides the fact that I have a chest freezer full of venison and pork at the moment, we are in the middle of an exceptional drought. These pigs had been digging the ground a fair bit but stank as a result of eating a lot of rotten meat. We're very selective about the pigs we eat and it's more important for the property owner and the environment that we remove them, regardless.
 
Great pics and write up, love looking at the pics, would love to get down there someday to hunt, thanks for sharing and keeping my dream alive (haunting me!).
 
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