Did another scouting trip a couple days ago, the leaves were so dry and crunchy I didn't even really try to hunt, just put in the miles to learn a new area. .
I have a question for others with more experience hunting pigs. This is the first year I've ever spent any time targeting hogs, in the past they've just been an opportunity target deer hunting. This is all on fairly heavily hunted public land FWIW. Preseason in this area I'd see them out and about, rooting around the on the side of the rode. I ride my mountain bike in the area and see hogs all the time. At the beginning of the season I hunted some areas of very heavy rooting activity and some pigs would still come in. It didn't take long though before the daytime visits to those areas shut off like a light switch.
I suppose it's no different from deer hunting, relaxed behavior preseason and more cagey as the pressure increases. I made a bunch of sits on spots that looked like a tractor drug a field plow through the woods and didn't see jack squat. Zero. Mornings, evenings, often perfect wind direction, I'd even see deer periodically in the area so it's not like my scent control, entry, movement, etc is horrible. I was just surprised at how pig behavior can look so careless at times yet seem to go 100% noctural on those big feeding areas when the pressure starts.
Anybody else see that same behavior in regard to that obvious rooting sign we're all familiar with? Going forward, I'm not wasting time hunting over those areas, I don't care how fresh or how much acreage is torn up, I'm walking past it and looking for the bedding areas. I saw more pigs "randomly" cruising through the woods than I did hunting over all that sign. I say randomly because it seemed like random cruising at the time, now that I've located their bedding areas they were probably headed for cover.
Around the camp I'd always heard "pigs are nomadic", that's why you see them for awhile and as there's some pressure they move off to another area and that's why you don't see them anymore. After what I've seen this year I'm not sure I believe that anymore. They may be more nomadic than deer but I've jumped a ton of them scouting on heavily hunted public in recent weeks and there's a whole pile of them that haven't gone anywhere. They're just hunkered down waiting for the season to end