By John E. Phillips

One of the biggest environmental threats to farmers, ranchers and other landowners is feral hogs. Their numbers have grown like wildfire in almost every state, and they’re destroying crops and rooting-up green fields and wildlife openings. In the State of Hawaii, wild pigs are even threatening the quality of the drinking water.

In one night, a pack of feral hogs can completely destroy a corn crop, a field of peas and beans or a turnip green or a watermelon patch. Much of the destruction comes not only from the hogs grazing on vegetables but also from their walking-around, stepping on plants and produce.

In many western areas, feral hogs also pose a threat to ranchers because they can become carnivorous and feed on newborn calves, sheep, goats and other livestock. Some sections of the U.S. have reported wild pigs breaking down fences to release domestic swine, so that they can breed them. In other parts of the country, wild hogs represent a far-bigger threat to landowners than coyotes or any other form of wildlife.

For this reason, oftentimes you can knock on doors and get permission to hunt feral pigs, especially before and after deer and turkey seasons. I can’t think of a better way to tune-up your hunting and shooting skills with your CVA muzzleloader than to plan a pig hunt before blackpowder deer season arrives in your home state. Hunting feral pigs allows you to test different loads and various bullet weights and hunt with all your CVA muzzleloaders. You can call conservation offices in states with no closed seasons or limits on wild hogs, and perhaps someone at the conversation office will direct you to a landowner who’s having a wild hog problem and needs someone to be his or her blackpowder solution.

Often after solving a landowner’s hog problem, you may be invited to not only hunt hogs on that property but also deer and turkeys. Why punch paper with your PowerBelt bullets when instead you can punch pork, have a great time hunting and bring home lean, delicious pork for you and your family to eat?

How to Hunt Wild Hogs

With the new CVA muzzleloaders, you can hunt close, or you can take feral pigs at more than 100 yards. You’ll probably stalk them, mainly around water sources and wet places, since hogs depend heavily on water. Often you’ll hear wild pigs before you see them. Easing along a creekbank or a riverbank, you may hear the feral pigs grunting and squealing. To take them, always remain downwind of them, and be scent-free. Although hogs have poor eyesight, they have extremely-keen noses. You may get to within 50 yards of a wild hog before you can take a shot.

The more you hunt with your CVA muzzleloader, the quicker you’ll be able to load and reload, and the more accurately you can shoot. Hunting wild hogs during the off-season with your CVA muzzleloader will tune you and your rifle up for the upcoming deer season and will put lean and nutritious bacon, pork chops, "southern" butts and spare ribs on your table. To make friends before deer season, possibly open-up new lands to hunt during deer season and improve your hunting skills, while providing more meat for the table, start searching today for landowners who have hog problems. Then you and your CVA muzzleloader can become the solution to these problems.

by John E. Phillips

Hunting with black powder is one of the fastest-growing shooting sports in America today. Many states don’t require a separate license for black-powder muzzleloader hunting. I’ve enjoyed hunting with black powder and a muzzleloader for more than 3 decades.

The black-powder hunter basically falls into three general categories and has three separate reasons for wanting to hunt with black powder.

The Muzzleloading Purist

He may be a buckskinner who wants to relive the experiences of Jeremiah Johnson, Jim Bridger and many of the mountain men of old. He will dress in buckskins, sleep on the ground and try and hunt much like the early pioneers did. He is a purist – a man obsessed with the history of the sport and the men who lived this way.

The All-Year Hunter

The second type of black-powder shooter is a man who is looking for any opportunity to extend his hunting season. By shooting black powder, he often has a longer season or starts his season earlier than a conventional-weapon hunter. Many times by shooting black powder, he can hunt on prime deer lands he can’t hunt on with his modern weapons. This outdoorsman wants to hunt as many days as he can in any area possible. If using a black-powder gun will provide that hunting opportunity, he will hunt with black powder.

The Advanced Hunter

The third kind of black-powder hunter is the man in search of a challenge. This outdoorsman has taken all the deer he needs to bag to prove his prowess as a hunter. The thrill of taking monstrous-racked deer or a limit of deer during the season is not the challenge it once has been. He knows he can take deer and does it consistently each season. This hunter is looking for a more-exciting sport that will add a new dimension to his deer hunting and will provide more satisfaction than what he previously has experienced hunting with modern weapons. This shooter is proud of the limitations imposed with black-powder hunting. He feels if he can take animals with a black-powder gun, his hunting experience will be far more rewarding than if he bags those same animals with a conventional weapon.

To have a longer hunting season, be able to take more game and hunt in the tradition of the early Americans, then the sport of black-powder hunting is for you.

By John E. Phillips

Most blackpowder hunters are concerned about the maximum effective ranges of their CVA rifles, and maximum range is important. However, you’ll find that you’ll take more big bucks if you hunt close like longbow hunters do than if you hunt open spaces where long shots are required. While a blackpowder rifle that’s effective to 200 yards and more is essential for western hunters, who often have to take long shots at whitetails, mule deer, elk and antelope, eastern hunters very rarely will need to make shots at more than 100 yards.

Some of the most-efficient hunters are bowhunters, especially longbow hunters who are limited to a maximum range of 20 to 30 yards. If you think and hunt like a bowhunter when hunting with your CVA muzzleloader, you’ll consistently take more and bigger bucks each season. Whitetails are creatures of shadow and shade, except during the rut. They prefer to stay in thick cover, hold in isolated cover and only will move into open places after dark. The more-mature bucks have learned that the greatest danger occurs when they cross open ground. Therefore, if you’ll learn to hunt with your CVA muzzleloader in thick cover, hunt the places no one else wants to hunt, look for bucks at distances less than 100 yards and spend more time scouting and less time sitting on a stand, you consistently will take more and bigger bucks than if you try to set up 100- to 200-yards away from where you expect the deer to appear.

Use trail cameras can scout for you. Once you identify the trails the deer are using, you can set-up cameras on different trails to determine the size and the number of bucks using those trails and the times of day or night when the better bucks are moving through the region. Then, by setting-up a tree stand or a ground blind 50- to 60-yards downwind of that trail, you may have the best opportunity to take a nice buck on the day you hunt. Also, the closer you get to the buck you want to take, the fewer problems you’ll have with wind drift and having obstacles between you and the buck that may deflect your bullets. This season, instead of trying to set-up as far away from a place where you expect bucks to appear and depending on the accuracy of your shot at 100 to 200 yards to take that buck, consider hunting the opposite way. Get in close, try not to take a shot at more than 60 yards, spend more time scouting than you do hunting, and rely on your woodsmanship to identify the trails to and from feeding and bedding sites and scrape lines. See how close you can get to the place where you expect bucks to appear.

When green-field hunting where you can make a shot of 100 yards or more, leave your shooting house in the middle of the day to pinpoint the trails the deer are using to enter and leave the green field. Follow these trails 100- to 400-yards back into the woods, and search sites where major trails intersect other trails. After checking the wind direction, set-up a ground blind or a tree stand at the intersection. Clear the brush between your tree stand or ground blind and the intersection of the two trails. Then when the buck appears, you’ll have a better chance of taking him.

The further you’re hunting away from a green field or an agricultural field the deer are using to feed, the better your opportunities are of seeing a big buck during daylight hours. Older-age-class bucks generally begin to move toward their feeding sites just before dark and begin to return there right before daylight. The closer you are to the bedding area, and the further you are from the feeding area, the better your odds are for taking an older-age-class buck at close range with your CVA muzzleloader. If you’re hunting a section of land with a lot of bow- and gun-hunting pressure, consider using a ground blind. In heavily-hunted places, deer will look for hunters in tree stands, often before they search for hunters in ground blinds. Too, in a ground blind, you can get much closer to the spot where you expect the deer to appear, while you remain unseen. You also can move more in a ground blind without a buck spotting you than you can when you’re in a tree stand. Instead of hunting at the maximum range of your CVA muzzleloader this season, you’ll take more blackpowder bucks, if you’ll hunt at ranges less than 100 yards.

By John E. Phillips

I’m not willing to wait until deer season starts to begin hunting with my CVA muzzleloader. I don’t want to wait until just before deer season to try to find new lands to hunt. I’m starting today to locate new places to hunt, and I’m going coyote hunting. I’ve got my CVA muzzleloader packed and plenty of PowerBelt bullets and powder with me.

Remember that when you’re asking permission to hunt on someone’s property, that landowner has no reason to allow you to hunt his or her lands for no charge. However, if you can solve a landowner’s problem, you not only will be a welcome hunter, you’ll also be a new friend.

Stockmen and truck farmers in just about every state have problems with coyotes. Coyotes eat sweet corn, watermelons and most other vegetables, although these animals primarily eat meat. If you can eradicate a number of coyotes for a landowner, you may become his new best friend as well as start to solve his predator problem.

What You Need to Know about Coyotes and Hunting Them

Never forget though that the coyote is a highly-intelligent, extremely-keen-nosed critter. If he smells you, the game’s over. One of the most-critical ingredients to successfully hunting and taking coyotes is to make sure that you have the wind in your face, or that you hunt across the wind, and that there’s some type of barrier that will prevent the coyote from moving downwind of you.

For instance, if you start calling coyotes along a creekbank or a riverbank to force the coyote to have to swim to move downwind of you, your chances of taking him are much better. A coyote will come to the edge of the water, if you call it in, and then the animal will sneak down the riverbank to come to you. If there’s a highway or a road at your back, the coyote will be unwilling to cross the road to get downwind of you. But never use a mountain, a rock bluff or any type of physical feature that rises behind you when hunting coyotes with your CVA muzzleloader. If you’re hunting with the wind in your face, the wind will blow your human odor right into that mountain or rock. Then when the wind containing your odor curls back, it will carry your odor to the incoming coyote. So, make sure when you’re hunting coyotes that you have an open-type barrier behind you that keeps the coyote from crossing the barrier but won’t stop the wind.

With today’s modern electronic predator callers with remote controls and coyote decoys, predator hunting is easier than ever previously. Also with the large number of coyote-hunting videos on the market today, you quickly and easily can learn to predator hunt while sitting in your favorite easy chair. However, to become a good predator hunter with your¬† muzzleloader, you’ll have to take your calls and hit the woods.

Don’t just sit around and mope because blackpowder deer season is months away. Instead, take your CVA muzzleloader out today, sight it in, get a predator caller and some decoys, and go coyote hunting now. If you don’t know where to hunt, call your conservation officer, who may know a list of landowners who are having coyote problems you can solve. Muzzleloading hunting with your CVA rifle is fun and exciting, and you can start today enjoying your gun by hunting coyotes.

Hunting’s over, well for a while‚Ķ‚Ķnot really. How so? Hog hunting. Cool‚Ķ‚Ķ.not really. Temperatures are rising, making the woods and swamps unbearable‚Ķ‚Ķnot really. You can stand it.

The cool thing about hog hunting is this: you can do it year-round and what with the shots being so close, usually less that 50 yards, a muzzleloader is perfect; big bullet, terrific knockdown power, great sport, one shot challenge. Muzzleloading. Perfect.

Two places I go this time of year are both south of Atlanta and Macon along the Ocmulgee River.

One is the Bond Swamp Wildlife Management Area, 12,000 acres of swamp, river, a few dry sandy hills about 3 feet over the water line and plenty of hogs. A few of the adjoining hunting clubs have some deer stands and some roads in, around and through the areas that are passable. On that passable subject, please let me pass along a bit of a warning. I say ‚Äòpass along’ because the warning was given to me by one of the ‚Äòregulars’. Don’t go in with an ordinary 4-wheel drive truck. I drive a 4-door Toyota Tundra, 5.7 liter V-8, a biggun and was told it wouldn’t be enough if it rained. The ‚Äòregulars’ drive oversized, mud bogging monsters. I listened. You should too just incase it gets wet while you’re there.

Anyway, you can plan on seeing a goodly number of resident hogs every morning and then every evening before dark. Sows with piglets, juvenile females and boars will splash through the shallow waters signaling the influx to the small openings along the roads and food plots. You can hear them coming.

On my last trip there, on the way to a stand along a road, I spot-stalked a small family rooting in the muddy vegetation. Now, you may be surprised by this but I rarely shoot the largest of a group. Listen, dragging out a hog from the swamp can be a challenge, so usually I look for and take one no more than 70 pounds. 300 pound specimens are not my choice.

I use a CVA Optima Elite, 50 caliber muzzleloader, a 270-grain PowerBelt Platinum bullet and 100 grains of American Pioneer Powder. For this type of hunting, a CVA muzzleloader is just right. Perfect again. Slowly maneuvering from tiny openings to brush lines, to standing trees to taking cover behind an old log, I get to within 40 yards. See? Hog hunting’s fun. Can you do that with Deer? Turkeys? Elk? Forget about it. You can’t.

Now, I’m there. Where to shoot the critter? Well, I don’t like tracking wounded hogs through the swamp in 6 inches of water, so my shot is always a brain shot, or not at all.

I did that. Bar-B Que’s on the way, made with wild whole pig back-strap, shoulder, ham and ribs.

More later on the second spot for summer time, or anytime, hog hunting.

O’Neill Williams