Last night was a good night on this new property I started hunting, save for the fact that my video was corrupted, but only the shooting parts. So either the DVR is dying or the SD card is. ERRRR.
I reported all to the landowner and got asked about how many hogs I had taken so far and so started doing some digging. After all, it wasn't like I was going to be spending any time editing video. Since May 4, we have taken 52 hogs off the property. The property is over 700 acres, but we have been hunting less than 500 of it. During this time, there have been 16 visits to the property for hunting, one of which was a drop by to see if anything was visible (nothing was and yielded nothing).
Those 52 (recovered) hogs comprise 8145-8345 lbs on the hoof. I had to estimate for 3 hogs that were found a day after one hunt, hence the weight range. Looking at the sizes of the hogs over time was really interesting because it revealed a positive pattern for hog hunting in regard to the size of breeding size hogs.
The first 11 hogs were killed over 5 nights. They averaged 192 lbs in size with 8 of the 11 being over 200 lbs including the two largest hogs killed, a sow and boar, each weighing 260.
About half way through, 11 hogs killed averaged 167 lbs (June 9 & 16, not including 3 that were 70 lbs and less). At this point, only 4 of the 11 hogs over 200 lbs.
There were 10 hogs from the last 2 nights. They averaged 152 lbs and only 2 of the last 10 hogs were over 200 lbs.
While there are multiple possible explanations for the trend, what I think is going on is that we, as hunters, have tended to focus on shooting the biggest hogs first. I have seen where most hunters tend to do this, particularly if they are trying to just kill hogs. Hunters tend to focus on the hogs that offer them the best shots or greatest likelihood for success and more often than not, the bigger hogs are the bigger and easier targets. After all, how many times have you hunted hogs with buddies and come across a sounder with a bunch of adult hogs and had one or more of the buddies calling dibs on the piglets? So if we are tending to shoot the bigger hogs first, it would fit that given the limited number of hogs likely to be hitting this property over a short period of time (2 months) that the average size of the biggest hogs would tend to decline with regular hunting.
Of course, this isn't any sort of absolute. When you get on a sounder and start shooting, you often shoot what you readily see in your crosshairs, but if you see multiple hogs, chances are you are going to try to shoot your largest choices, first, though they may not be the largest of the group. Even so, I think all that still fits with the general overall pattern. The more hogs you take out of the heavier end of the scale, less your average size hog taken will be over time with regular hunting.
If this pattern keeps up, then I would hope that within a couple more months, the largest hogs that we would be regularly seeing are no more than 150 lbs. The exceptions will be if new sounders move into the area or big lone boars move into to the area since we have likely removed most of the bigger lone boars that would have been here.