Although rural Florida is almost overrun with wild hogs, it’s still difficult to bag a hog in Florida’s public wildlife management areas. In the WMAs where hogs are common, access to these areas often requires a quota permit which are limited in number and usually drawn by lottery or in the cases where they are first come first serve, they are often sold-out months in advance.

In WMAs where hogs are not so common, hunting them is a real challenge. Hog signs will be everywhere without a single hog in sight. A willingness to go farther and stay longer than anyone else is often necessary for successful hog hunting.

After two seasons of pursuing wild hogs on public land without… Continue reading

Hunting wild hogs is very different from hunting deer and requires a different shot placement. Hog’s have a very tough shoulder blade which can stop an arrow and in some cases even a bullet.

Shot placement on a whitetail deer is always a heart or lung shot. However, the best shot placement for a wild hog is behind the ear.

In most situations, this shot will drop a hog right where he’s… Continue reading

This weekend I went to the public wildlife management area near my home to do some scouting. The WMA doesn’t permit motorized vehicles beyond the parking lot and the entrance to the WMA is one mile from the parking lot. For this reason most people entering the area do so on mountain bikes.

I was riding my bike up the main trail past the first gated entrance when suddenly I spotted a wild turkey just a short distance inside the barbwire. Looking twice, however, I realized it was fake. I looked a little further and saw a blind set up with two men peeking over it watching me ride by.

My first thought was, “Sorry for riding through your… Continue reading

Having never killed anything larger than a rabbit, my goal for the fall of 2013 is to kill my first deer and first hog.

There is a wildlife management area only 20 minutes from my home. It’s easy for me to drive there on Saturday mornings and scout for deer and hog signs. I’ve already been there for the past three weekends in a row and am beginning to become vary familiar with the area. I’ve even picked out several areas within it that I want to investigate closely on future scouting trips.

However, just 45 minutes to the north is another management area that boasts some of the best hunting in the state through its quota hunt program… Continue reading

During my first few visits to a nearby wildlife management area I’ll be hunting this fall, my goals were simply to explore and understand where the boundaries were and to get a good feel for the lay of the land. Because this particular portion of the wildlife management area is 3,200 acres I’ve been riding the trails on my mountain bike as a way of covering large areas in short periods of time (motorized vehicles are not permitted here).

Last weekend I went back out there with the intent of scouting for deer and hog signs along a two mile stretch of canal which I assumed whitetail deer and wild hogs would use for drinking water. I again brought my… Continue reading

This coming hunting Season I’ll be hunting close to home and on public land which limits me to two locations, The Upper St. Johns River Marsh Wildlife Management Area and the Tosohatchee Wildlife Management Area.

This weekend I’ll be making my third trip to the Upper St. Johns to do some scouting. The first two trips were merely to become familiar with the location and its boundaries.

Although the Upper St. Johns River Marsh has a total of 120,000 acres, I’ll be focusing my hunting efforts this year on an area that is approximately 3,200 acres. Most of this area is, presently, dry marsh which looks like a giant meadow except for having tall species of grass… Continue reading

My Personal Definition of Hunting

My personal definition of hunting is the pursuit of animals that are completely wild. These animals live their lives in such a way that no human being exerts any form of control over them except for the occasions when the animal runs from people encountered in the wilderness.

To shoot an animal whose range has been pre-determined by a fence, or who is released from a pen prior to a hunt, or who has been trained to regularly return to a specific location in order to receive food distributed by a mechanical device is not, what I would consider, hunting.

In my mind, the whole point of hunting is to discover… Continue reading

Interested in visiting or hunting the Upper St. Johns River Marsh wildlife management area inside the River Lakes Conservation area?

The following is my personal experience at this location.

When I became interested in learning how to hunt, some early advice I received was the need to go scouting prior to hunting season. It’s extremely important to learn where the wildlife frequents in order to find them during hunting season. Spending plenty of time scouting is important and this can’t be done effectively at locations that are hours away from home. Being a Brevard County resident, I decided the best chance I had at becoming a successful hunter was to start scouting a location nearby. So I choose the Upper St. Johns River Marsh wildlife management area… Continue reading