Twin Elements Podcast · Hunting Stories
Bedded Boars: Patience, Anatomy & Tough Shots In The Mud
Every boar we found on our recent Coburg Peninsula trip was bedded. Not one was up feeding when we spotted it. In that heat, with water this scarce, that's simply where the pigs were going to be — tucked into shade close to the last patch of mud that didn't have a crocodile living in it. It ended up being one of the more instructive stretches of bowhunting either of us has done, so I wanted to break down what we actually learned.
In This Report
From the Field
Dry-season floodplain country on the Coburg Peninsula — the kind of resource-scarce ground that pushes every animal toward the same handful of water sources.
Why Bedded Beats Feeding
A feeding boar moves fast and covers ground erratically — genuinely hard to keep pace with. A bedded boar isn't going anywhere. He might shuffle within his wallow, but he's not abandoning that spot for another one across the property. That gives you something feeding animals rarely offer: time. Time to assess the angle you're going to get rather than just the angle you happened to spot him at, time to pick a better line of approach, and time to let your instincts settle rather than rushing on adrenaline.
A bedded animal is also, put simply, a stationary target — one position, time to range it, settle, and execute, compared to a broadside shot on an animal that could flee the moment it senses you. You can't rewind and play catch-up; in bowhunting, that doesn't exist. Once he's up and moving, unlike a travelling animal picking its own threatened approach route, you've lost the one advantage bedded game hands you.
That last point matters more than people expect. The natural impulse when you spot a big bedded boar is to think you need to close the distance immediately before he wakes up and leaves. In reality, he's probably been in that bed for hours already, and he's not going anywhere in the next two minutes. Rushing the last thirty steps instead of taking an extra sixty seconds to arc around for a better angle is the single biggest way people blow these stalks. A masked lapwing giving an alarm call every five minutes is background noise to a dozing boar. The same call firing every six seconds because you're crashing toward him is an alarm bell.
“Step. Stop. Listen. That's really the whole method — the wind was a steady south-easterly that trip, and every stall to check it was time well spent, not time wasted.”
Why the Gear Actually Matters Here
Bedded boars are almost always partially obstructed — mud, water, matted hair, a fallen log, dense root systems — and that changes what you should be shooting. We run solid two-blade, cut-on-contact broadheads for exactly this reason. Mechanical or three-blade heads lose penetration fast once they're fighting through mud, debris, and a boar's genuinely thick hide and shield, and a shot that only gets partial penetration on an animal this size is how you end up trailing (or losing) a wounded pig rather than recovering it cleanly.
A bedded posture works against you here too: with the legs folded up alongside the body, a boar naturally shields more of its vital cavity than it would standing or walking, sometimes leaving only a sliver at the armpit or a genuinely inferior angle through the rib cage as your only option. It's a harder shot to place well by nature, which is exactly why the margin for penetration loss needs to be as small as possible.
Arrow setup matters just as much. A properly supported outsert stops deflection or snapping when you need to punch through a shoulder, scapula, or spine — which, on a hundred-plus kilo swamp boar with an inch of shield plus solid bone underneath, is a real possibility, not a hypothetical. And because bedded boars often present narrow, obstructed windows — a gap under a fallen limb, a shot that has to clear a bank — it's worth practising your full draw from kneeling, seated, and squatting positions long before you're actually in that scenario. A single, adjustable-slider sight pin has been a genuine advantage for us here: rather than guessing between fixed pins at an awkward in-between range, you dial straight to the distance and know exactly where that arrow's landing.
The Double
The best stretch of the whole trip came at a tiny waterhole — barely the size of a tennis court, the one spot we were fairly confident didn't have a crocodile in it — that turned into an absolute oasis for pigs once the rest of the country dried up.
The first double came almost by accident. We'd glassed one boar submerged to the chin in mud, only his back and ears showing, and hadn't even clocked a second boar bedded behind a log until we were already inside fifteen metres. Both were buried so deep there was barely a shot angle available — I ended up climbing onto fallen logs just to get enough elevation to change the angle in my favour. The first boar didn't run far once hit; the second didn't even flinch at the commotion, simply shifted to another patch of mud a few metres over, and gave me a second, clean shot minutes later. Two mature boars, one location, a twenty-degree change in angle between them.
The second double, later that same trip, was tighter still. A big boar stood up just long enough for me to clock his ivory and frame — genuinely a hundred kilos plus — before rebedding among mangrove roots and deadfall. The wind wasn't cooperating, so James and I knew we'd need to get inside five metres to have any real shot. Creeping across dry, crackly mud toward an animal that's probably never encountered a human in its life is its own kind of tension — and sure enough, as I edged around a tree at full draw, he was already up and staring straight at us, clearly aware something wasn't right even if he couldn't place what. He held just long enough on the move for a slightly quartering shot to present, and the two-blade did its job again. Walking away from that pig, I spotted a second boar lying under a log less than fifty metres off, completely undisturbed by the first shot — a stalk in to fifteen metres later, he went down thirty to forty metres from where he stood.
We'd walked what felt like ten kilometres that morning without a single decent pig encounter. Then one small, secluded waterhole delivered more opportunities in an afternoon than the rest of the trip combined — a good reminder that in genuinely dry, resource-scarce country, finding the one water source everything is funnelling toward matters more than covering ground.
Shot Sequence
The bedded boar was spotted first by his ear, barely twitching above the mud line. What follows is the stalk in, the final positioning for a clean angle, and the shot execution itself.
Field Gear & Safaris
The Adventure Continues
Join the Twin Elements team as they head back into the Australian bush.
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This piece is adapted from a Twin Elements Podcast episode on bedded boar hunting tactics, drawn from the Coburg Peninsula banteng and boar trip with Dingo Creek Hunting Safaris.
