Hunting Stories

Hog Deer : Ten Days Chasing Shadows In The Grass

Oct 19, 2026

Twin Elements · Hunting Stories

Hog Deer : Ten Days Chasing Shadows In The Grass

By Ayden Doumtsis

Hog deer are Australia’s smallest feral deer.

Weighing a mere fifty kilos live weight, standing barely seventy centimetres at the shoulder, with a three tined rack that tops out around sixteen inches on a truly exceptional stag. They’re also, we quickly learned, after ten days hunting some of the most maddening animals we’ve ever tried to put an arrow into.

A Species Unlike Anything We’ve Hunted

Hog Deer

Hog deer are unique in Australia for being legally classified as a game species rather than a pest. They are managed by Victoria’s Game Management Authority, hunted only during April (without exceptions), with each licensed hunter allocated one male (stag) tag and one female (hind) tag for the season. Introduced in the 1860s, they’ve built a stronghold in the wider Gippsland region. We were lucky enough to hunt private land managed by a friend who has spent a lifetime obsessed with these minuscule deer. His hunting cabin is enamoured with fifteen to twenty hog deer mounts and literally hundreds of cast antlers collected over decades of walking the surrounding paddocks.

That private access should have made things easier. It didn’t, not really. Hog deer earn their nickname “shadows of the grass” as they blend into the vegetation seamlessly. Honestly, one of the greatest challenges bowhunting these animals is that they live in a sea of tussock and cane grass thick enough to swallow a seventy centimetre animal completely. Even from a purpose built three metre elevated hunting blind, we’d regularly discover afterward that a dozen deer had been bedded within a hundred metres the entire day without a single one showing so much as an ear tip.

Learning Their Rules

The Cabin

The single biggest behavioural quirk: hog deer hate wind. Anything over about five knots and they go completely to ground, sometimes for five or six hours straight. The moment the breeze drops and the sun comes out, they materialise as if from nowhere. We spent long, wind blown stretches standing on fence posts or halfway up ladders just to get enough elevation to glass three sixty degrees over grass tall enough to hide every sign of life.

We also badly misjudged how much noise and movement they’ll tolerate. Coming from other deer species, our instinct was to slow down to a crawl at fifty to a hundred metres out. We were worried about the risks of educating any deer to a threat should a stalk be blown. Our host quickly corrected us, mentioning that “you can move at near normal pace to thirty or forty metres and only slow for the final approach”. This was attributed to the fact that hog deer simply don’t associate noise with danger the way most deer do. Their entire sensory world is bounded by the grass around them. If they can’t see far past their own noses, they’re not spooking at distant footfalls either. Their best defence, as it turns out, isn’t flight, it’s simply holding dead still and betting that whatever’s coming will walk straight past, the same way a hundred previous hikers and farm vehicles already have.

The Trick To Spotting Them

Shadows In The Grass

The single most useful skill we picked up was learning to read stillness against movement. With any breeze at all, every blade of grass across a paddock sways in the same rhythmic give and take dance. However, to the keenest of eyes, a set of antler tips, or the flick of an ear, stays completely motionless against that background. More than once, we walked past what should have been an obvious animal at close range simply because we were looking for a standing deer rather than two small white shapes holding dead still in a moving field. Once you train your eye to spot stillness rather than shape, everything changes.

The Stalk That Nearly Broke Us

The Blind

Each morning started the same. Arrive before dawn and climb into the blind. We had the essentials; optics, warm clothes, a Yeti with coffee, our bows, a hopeful attitude and plenty of patience. By day seven, after plenty of sightings but painfully few close encounters, we finally strung together a real stalk. It wasn’t that we weren’t seeing deer, we were, it’s just that hunting such a small block of land, many of the animals were either on the neighbours, or in a position where the wind didn’t allow an approach. Every time you left the vantage point that was the blind, you had a sinking feeling of losing all landmarks and features. We’d bumped a hind out of the grass without ever seeing her. Only the flash of a white tail gave her away. Seeing as we were already down the far corner of the paddock, with the evening in full swing we decided to wait. With fading light we began moving through waist high thistle and dock, glassing constantly as we progressed towards the thicket cover where we assumed hog deer would be finding their feet. One step, glass. One or two more steps, glass. We were moving painstakingly slow through a sea of long tall grass, the odd blackberry thicket and plenty of scattered thistles. Eventually, through pure luck and chance, I caught two small white tips standing utterly still against the swaying grass at fifteen metres. Antler tips! Motionless, dead ahead.

Just as I had seen the stag, I motioned to James and hit record on the camera. The following recount occurred through the lens for me. However James tells the story as such; “Having seen Ayden’s demeanour change and his attention lock on the grass ahead, I peered back and forth with the binoculars. After twenty to thirty seconds I frustratingly looked at Ayden for an insight, yet he still looked through the camera in the direction I had been glassing. Just as I went to utter, “what are you looking at”, I saw it. Two antler tips in the grass agonisingly close. From the angle of the tips and where the brows sat, I knew the stag was looking straight at us. Acknowledging this, I actioned for what was to come.”

The stag stood from his bed. At fifteen metres, now in relatively clear, unobstructed view. We could finally appreciate the details of these amazing animals. James had already raised his bow in agonisingly small increments over what felt like an eternity, waiting for the stag’s ears to face away before beginning an achingly slow six second draw on his eighty pound bow. When you think of it, the bow’s cams must’ve been rolling in the tiniest of increments until they rolled over and gave him the much needed let off as he hit full draw. It was the kind of drawn out, perfectly controlled sequence you only get away with on an animal that hasn’t yet decided you’re a threat. He held, aimed just below the grass line where he could see the stag’s chest, and began his shot sequence. In the last possible instant, the stag had decided enough was enough, turned to leave and the arrow sailed clean over its back.

It was a gutting miss after seven long days of sitting and hoping. James will be the first to admit he felt sick about it in the moment. But there was a genuine silver lining buried in the disappointment. Reviewing the footage afterward, we realised this exact stag, a beautiful, mature animal with a broken antler tip from fighting, had also been the one I’d stalked to within five metres days earlier. Same broken tine, same long main beam, bedded twice now within fifty metres of the same spot. Whatever pressure we’d put on him clearly hadn’t been enough to shift his pattern, which meant one thing. He was still out there, still predictable, and we still had days left on the trip to find him again.

A New Day, A New Approach

Stalking The Broken Tine

We went hard the next morning, genuinely ravenous on the glass after the previous night’s low. James had started using the Windy app almost obsessively through this hunt. Tracking not just wind direction for where to sit, but knot by knot changes, working out when hog deer were likely to be up and moving versus locked down, bedded tight out of the wind. That morning we spotted a mature stag bedding down right on a fence line just after sunrise. Using a distinctive tree on the horizon, we carefully lined him up for a direct line of approach and used the forecast to plan the whole day around him. As per usual, we played the patience game and sat tight through the morning. Then, when the time permitted, circled around for a controlled approach once the wind shifted westerly around ten am.

What followed was four hours standing dead still, bow half raised, waiting for a deer that never moved. James described his bicep ached for days afterward just from holding the bow, motionless in that obscure position. At one point he nearly blew the whole sit fighting off a cough he couldn’t suppress. Nothing happened. Frustrated, with nothing to show for it, we pulled back to the blind to reset. We climbed up the ladder, threw the glass to our faces, only to have the exact same stag appear standing in full view, a hundred metres away! Within seconds he vanished into cover again before James could even get the camera up. It was a genuine reminder of just how close these animals can be while feeling a world away.

Closing The Distance

The Hunt

James used the same landmark trick that had worked before. Lining up a distinctive tree against the horizon and slowly worked his way in over forty minutes. A strategy he used before leaving the blind, was to range the stag where he lay. That was, once James was on the ground, in the long grass, he could turn back to the blind, range and work out how much further he needed to travel. Ranging his position in careful increments, he closed the gap to twenty metres. Even at this distance, the way the stag was bedded was ambiguous. James could only see centimetres of antler tips in the long grass. The stag must’ve woke part way through the approach, lifting his head and shaking his antlers. A telltale sign, we’ve learned, of a bedded animal getting uncomfortable and readying to move. James held at twenty odd metres in a half squat, watching the stag roll from one side to the other, licking himself, clearly agitated by flies and heat. The more he moved and wriggled, the more he gave away his exact body position. What followed was five to seven minutes of the worst buck fever James says he’s ever experienced. His heart hammering hard enough, that he was convinced the stag could hear it. One leg on the verge of cramping as he held a half squat. While the other leg shook uncontrollably with adrenaline.

The Shot

Hoggie Success

When the stag finally stood, he presented a tight quartering away angle. Ready for this exact moment, he came to full draw and settled the pin just off the hip. James trusted the setup completely. An eighty pound bow, the Hoyt RX9 Ultra. Shooting a 175 grain Kayuga pilot cut broadhead backed by a Day Six shaft. This was the same combination that had already punched clean through a red stag’s chest cavity the week before and driven clean through big game animals such as elk and buffalo. There was no doubt of the performance. He held, waited through the stag’s restless licking and repositioning, and released.

The arrow landed exactly where he aimed. The stag bolted in an arc roughly sixty metres out and vanished into the grass. Which, true to form for this species, told us nothing about whether the shot had done its intended job. We searched methodically, tracking every drop amongst the grass. It wasn’t until James looked up from checking his phone and the trail he had started, when he spotted an antler tip in the grass just five metres in front of him. He shouted, turned back to me, and the relief and joy in that moment were something else entirely. The culmination of eight days, multiple failed stalks, and a level of investment that made the payoff feel earned in every sense.

The Same Stag, All Along

The Finer Details

What made it even more special. This was, without question, the same stag on three different occasions. His broken antler tip and affinity for a bed in that same area confirmed it. I’d stalked to within five metres days earlier. Then, James had missed at fifteen metres the day before. Three separate close encounters with the one animal over four days, and on the third real opportunity, it finally came together.

The next morning we checked in and processed the stag as part of the Game Management Authority’s data collection. This includes confirming tags and licensing. Recording the area the animal was hunted, private vs public, method of take, etc. Then came the hands on criteria where he measured well. His antlers taped out at twelve inches by eleven. He weighed fifty two point three kilos field dressed. Interestingly, when speaking with the measurer on the day, approximately fifty hog deer stags had been checked in to that point in the April season. At the point of our visit, with ninety centimetres of girth around the chest, James’s stag was the second longest and second heaviest hog deer recorded thus far. He didn’t have the longest measuring antlers, but genuinely one of the most physically substantial animals of the season. A long, heavy bodied critter and exactly the kind of mature, hard earned trophy that makes an eight day grind on a species this frustrating entirely worth it.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t get to lay hands on a hog deer this trip. Although sneaking into five yards of James’s stag only days earlier was a neat consolation. It’s still wild to me, that at five metres, and at full draw the grass concealed the stag’s vitals and I wasn’t able to loose an arrow before he moved off. Leaving Gippsland behind, we made some great memories. Watching James close out this story and learning so much about this secretive little species taught us a lot. It’s a hunt neither of us will forget and one I fully intend to revisit in the future and tag a hog deer stag myself.

The Check In Station