Boaring...

César, Tainar and his sword, the author, Ivandro

Last weekend I had went boar hunting for the first time in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, near the city of Bom Jesus.

It all started during a business lunch on Friday when we were having small talk and César mentioned that he was going boar hunting that night and the next day. Without any shame I volunteered to take part on the expedition, and pretty soon we had all arranged.

At 6:30 PM Ivandro and Gordo picked me up at the hotel, then we drove to César and finished loading the gear, which besides a couple 12 gauge shotguns and 308 rifles included rolled mattresses and a lot of blankets, as Brazil was facing record low temperatures.

After about two and half hours drive in tortuous single land roads we came to the 2,600 acres estância that we would hunt on, and immediately met the rest of the group, Kid and his son Tainar, and their friend Gordinho, and the first order was to uncorck some good wine, make some coppa and salami sandwiches, and of course start an almost endless exchange of tall tales and lie, which is rather typical of any gathering of hunters or fishermen.

Around 11:30 PM we went out for the first hunt, spotlighting for boar in two different trucks. The team developed a good technic: a heavy wool blanket is placed on the top of the truck cabin and secured by both back doors, and a shotgun or rifle can be safely placed on top. One spotter and a shooter travel on the bed.

When we left the temperature had dropped to just above freezing, and not fifty yards from the ranch house we saw he first animal, a graxain, which is a South American cousin of the fox that pretty much ignored our presence. Either graxains are not hunted or a very stupid.

Within the next several minutes or one mile we saw a couple lebrões (European hare) and an enormous Coati-mundi. Again, we left them untouched and continued our search for the invasive and illusion boars.

After wadding through a small river where some capybaras made their home, we came across a herd of steers that were looking for protection against the cold wind. We negotiated passage and left them behind. 

At the end of our eight mile drive we came to the edges of a large swamp, and very soon located a couple of the small veado catingueiro, which is similar to, but smaller than a brocket deer. We observed one of the animals for several minutes before it decided to bid us good night and look for more private bedding grounds.

When we started back he temperature dropped to just below freezing and we made to our galpão without much to talk about. After some more wine to warm up a bit we prepared our beds and bunked in completely dressed. The wind and total lack of insulation and heating (the lone fireplace was far away) forced us to use the heavy wool blankets to cover us from feet to head.

Saturday morning we had breakfast and had the unpleasant surprise of finding Kid's pick-up truck with three flat tires, both on the driver's side plus the spare, a reminder of some of the large potholes we found the previous night. This changed plans a bit, as we had to release the hounds by the ranch house and Tainar and Gordino would walk them to the swamps where we believed the boars were hiding, and it was a long, long walk.

The younger boys led the pack of hounds throughout several swamp patches over four or five hours, while we older, and in my case fatter, gentlemen surrounded the swamp. While walking around we flushed a couple perdiz, saw some marrecas (South American teals), and admired a very large carcará hawk. Later on while I walked he edges of a swamp I first hear the unmistakable pit-pit-pit of the narceja or aguaterro, the South American cousin of our dear woodcock.

Later in the morning while crossing a part of the swamp to meet some of the guys I heard the cryptic song of the siriema, a long legged snake eating bird, that enjoys running more than flying, and could be compared to the African secretary bird.

We stopped hunting around noon when it was already warm enough not to require a jacket anymore. We gathered the dogs, but could never take a good photo with the ten all together.

Fixing the tire was a hole different story and I will not bother you with it, and on our way home we stopped at a local restaurant and enjoyed a large fresh trout lunch. 

Although we did not see any boars during this hunt I was not bored at all. I had not hunted since my latest quail hunt in Alabama, back in March, and I had not seen so much animal diversity in Brasil in a long time.

I am sure that this was the first of many hunts that I will enjoy with my new friends, and saw some very large mounted hogs that are testimony to their presence in the region.

As a final note, after getting back to my hotel in Caxias do Sul I had a long hot shower, ordered some chicken and rice soup, and enjoyed a warm cozy bed for a very comfortable night.

Living with the 28 Gauge

The end of a great afternoon

Nobody will argue that the 12 gauge is the queen of all shotguns. It is the most available, the most used, the most flexible, and would be my recommendation to almost anyone that is getting start in shotguns, provided they have the size and muscles to handle the weight of the gun (recoil is no longer a problem with the advent of “featherweight” and low pressure target rounds that will shoot ¾ to 7/8 ounces).

But, with all its qualities the 12 may be just too much gun, and if it is the queen, then, in my opinion the 28 gauge is the princess of shotguns. I know that a lot of people will make their cases for the 16 and 20 gauges and a few may even put a word or two for the 410 bore. And the 24 and 32 gauges are all but forgotten.

Anyway, my vote and my case are for the 28 gauge and the light and in the majority of cases well-balanced guns that shoot it. And the last point is very important, if you are going to use a 28, make sure to select a gun that is made in a properly sized frame, and not some misconceived and ungainly aberration that just happen to haven smaller holes drilled in barrels that would handle a 20 gauge shell easily.

If you read other posts in this blog you will already know that our household guns when I grew up were 28 gauges, and that they were big enough to handle all the hunting that we had around.

At that time in Brazil the standard 28 gauge shells were waxed paper 2 ½ inches (65 mm) loaded with 5/8 ounces (15,5 grams) of shot. The available shot sizes were T (an uncommon size in the US, it is slightly larger than BB), 3, 5 and 7.

T shot is recommended for animal up to the size of a paca or agouti (Cuniculus paca), which is probably the best tasting meat we will ever have the pleasure of eating, and my father used it very successfully for that. For all feathered game, including waterfowl (the most prevalent around our farm were paturis (Netta erythrophtalma) which are similar to teals) and upland birds we used shot No. 5.

For larger game like capivara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) we relied on IDEAL slugs. The IDEAL is an European design that never caught up in the US, and is basically a pure lead cylinder that has three rings around it in the outside (this allows the slug to be stable while moving through the barrel and the external rings can deform when passing through the choke) and spiral groves inside that look like an helix or a propeller, therefore the popular name Helix Bullet. The internal groves are supposed to make the projectile spin during flight and provide enhanced stability and precision. To prove this we would put one slug inside the gun barrel and blow air from the shop compressor and the slug would really spin. If that really happened on flight I don’t know.

Later when I started having to hand load my own brass shot shells for capivara I replaced the more expensive IDEAL slugs by fishing sinkers of more or less the appropriate size, and used them quite effectively on an old Rossi Overland, side-by-side exposed hammer shotgun. I had a lot of fun with this gun and still have it stored in Brazil. It is completely out of face, one of the barrels has a bulge and the lower rib is coming apart, and it has not fired a shot in twenty years, but I could not part away from the little rack.

If you fast forward from my childhood to the last ten years, I have had many different 28 gauge shotguns here in the US and used them quite extensively, but solely for clay shooting and upland birds.

I had a very nice Beretta 686 that I could shoot quite well, but traded for a Browning 20 gauge side-by-side if for no other reason than I am really infatuated with side-by-side guns. This gun saw quite a bit of use on pheasants in many preserves in Michigan and on mourning doves in some farms in Indiana, since Michigan laws prevents us from shooting our birds before they migrate to Indiana where we must pay a lot more to shoot them. The only exception was the fall of 2004 when we had the only experimental dove season in Michigan (see blog “The Missed Doves of Michigan, September 2011).

Then I had a really charming Remington 1100 Sporting that I used as part of the trade for another side-by-side, this time an AyA 16 gauge, if for no other reason that I was tired of looking for ejected shells all over the local skeet fields and just could not use it if there was snow on the ground as 28 gauge shells are too expensive not to be reloaded.

Eventually I was able to overcome all the infamous Brazilian red tape and bring my dad’s Beretta 28 side-by-side Model 409 to the US and I already commented about this fantastic little gun on other posts. Initially I shot it very little as it was chambered for 2 ½ inch shells, but that is now solved as this gun was fully restored by Del Whitman.

Recently Brenneke started offering 28 gauge 5/8 ounce slugs, but I have no experience with them. Before that I created my own big game ammo by loading two 50 caliber musket balls inside a standard wad. Unhappily I never did any comprehensive tests to evaluate their performance, but I have little doubt that they would be as deadly as any muzzleloader shooting similar projectiles.

The last 28 gauge that I bought is a Browning Model 12 grade I. This gun fits me particularly well and outshoots almost any other gun that I have. My highest score at trap was shot with it, using ¾ ounces low speed reloads with No. 8 shot.

However during all these years and having shot all these fine guns I had one frustration. I had never used a 28 gauge to hunt codorna or perdiz (Nothura maculosa), the princess of upland birds that my father used to hunt. Before you ask, the queen of upland birds is the perdigão or martineta (Rhynchotus rufescens), but that is another story.

Finally in last July during my latest trip to Uruguay I was able to finally have the princess of shotguns and the princess of upland birds on the same date. I used a Stoeger/Boito/ERA 28 gauge side-by-side, and shot Spanish made ¾ ounces 7 ½ shells to shoot a 10 bird limit on perdiz every afternoon that I went out, and for an inexpensive Brazilian made shotgun, it performed amazingly well. All birds that I hit fell hard, and the many that I missed were entirely my fault.

On the mornings we shot doves and the odd pigeons, and I noticed no difference on my hit ratio compared to the 16’s and 20’s that I used on previous years and there was the added benefit of not having a sore shoulder once the morning was over.

On the last evening we performed a service to a local farming by thinning out the caturrita or cotorro (Myiopsitta monachus), a highly destructive vermin in the form of colorful parrot. Their nests were located in a eucalyptus grove and since we were not there for sport anything was fair game and we wanted to get the most of the shells that we had. I remember bringing seven birds down with a single shot, and at the end of the culling we shot about seventy five birds with less than forty shells.

Life is too short to do things that we don’t enjoy, so I am quite happy to be living with the 28 gauge for over four decades, since the days that I used to follow my father’s steps while hunting perdiz over our English pointer Diana in our farm in Brazil, and retrieving the spent 28 gauge paper hulls just to smell their inebriant essence, until some weeks ago when I first had the opportunity to smell a Michigan woodcock shot by the same Beretta shotgun.

And I hope that I will be able to continue to enjoy many other “adventures”.

Capybara

Photo by Eloir Mário Marcelino

The capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) is the largest rodent in the world, and when I started hunting “big game” as a child and teenager in northern São Paulo state, the “Alta Mogiana” region of Brazil in the late 1970’s and 1980’s it was pretty much the only such wild animal that we had around.

My father would hunt capybaras with hounds that we called “Americanos”, since they basically are American Foxhounds. The way to hunt capybaras with hounds is to let the dogs loose in a swamp, the typical habitat for the capybaras. When pursued the capybaras natural instinct is to go for water, so we would “block” the local small river or stream with a net, which we would make with a length of chain-link fence, in order to make them surface.

A couple hunters would work the dogs while one or more shooter or blocker would stay at the net in order to shoot the capybara when it surfaced. Generally they would hit the net hard before they would surface or try to swim against the current. This would be a very trilling moment, and at one occasion a friend that my dad had invited hunting ejected all the shells from his rifle without firing a single shot, due to his level of excitement.

My dad at a time had a very large cannel. The master dog was a female named Canoa. Other names that I remember are Corumbá, Botafogo, Rosana and Sargento, the later a yellow dog, clearly not a foxhound. But by the early 1980’s a hepatitis epidemic killed most of the dogs, and eventually my father stopped hunting.

Around this same time I started hunting with some of the farmer employees, in a very different manner. We would either build an elevated shooting platform or look for a suitable tree at a proper place in the swamp, and then we would use calls to attract the capybaras. It looks almost like deer hunting, except we hunted at night and had to use flashlights to help us see what we were shooting at.

The call was made out of a flattened and then bent bottle cap, with a small role made on the top part. The bending and tuning of the call or “pio” is more of an art (almost lost I would say) than science.

The only guns that we had at the farm were shotguns. We had two 28 gauge side-by-side, a Rossi with exposed hammers (that was “my” gun), and a nice hammerless Beretta that was never used in the harsh swamp environment. Later on my dad bought two 12 gauges trap guns, and we started loading the shells with IDEAL slugs.

The first time that I went hunting with a gun was at “ the island”, a place upriver were we had built an elevated stand some days before. I took the Rossi 28 and Mr. Candinho, a long time farm employee and the same gentleman that lost a part of a finger to a dead alligator and shot a 21-foot anaconda out of my father’s arm (but those are other stories), took one of the 12 gauge guns.

We climbed the stand overlooking the “Córrego do Rosário” at dusk and waited for nightfall. The first animal to come by was an opossum or something similar. Later on two alligators swam the river. Finally after what felt like an eternity a capybara herd started to approach, taking their time to graze on the swamp vegetation.

As the herd was in front of us I had one of the most severe attacks of what I later came to know as buck fever and just shot my gun on the general direction of the herd. Immediately all capybaras dived in the river and disappeared.

Eventually I was successful on my chase for the big tasty rodent, but first adventures have a special place in our hearts.

By the way, today, June 10^th, my father would turn sixty-seven if he was still with us.