2007-2008 Rabbit Season Wrap Up

2007-2008 Rabbit Season Wrap Up
By E.F. Miller
February 20th, 2008

My hunting buddies and I have wrapped up the 2007-08 rabbit-hunting season. All things considered we had a better season than last year. A better season doesn’t necessarily mean we harvested more rabbits. It was a better season because we received permission to hunt some new areas with some new friends and our schedules and significant others allowed us to hunt more often. We made a total of ten trips out this season. It may not sound like much considering the season length but we took nearly two months off from rabbit hunting to concentrate on deer hunting. We hunted mainly in Meade County by going to the Andyville area three times, Stith Valley twice, Old Weldon twice, Guston once, and Flaherty once. My hunting partner had a contact in Caneyville over in Grayson Co. and we hunted a farm there once. Most of the areas we hunted had good cover; briars, brambles, vines and the like but in many cases the food sources were scarce. This was, in some cases because of the drought this past summer. Many farmers had to harvest all the hay or anything that looked like it could be hay to feed livestock. They didn’t leave much crop residue in the fields. A couple of areas we hunted had a great combination of cover and food sources but low rabbit numbers. A little further investigating proved a higher than normal amount of predator pressure. Coyotes seemed to be mostly to blame although feral cats took their share. When the culprits could be located we made sure they received their “share” of #6 shot. I am happy to report that we found three separate coveys of quail this year compared to none last year. I take this as a good sign considering we weren’t hunting quail and likewise had no bird dogs. Two of the coveys were of a dozen or so birds each and one was better than twenty-five birds. The two smaller coveys were flushed from the edges of soybean fields and the larger covey was flushed from a small weed field. We did manage to harvest a couple birds from the three coveys.

I mentioned earlier we hunted ten times this year, which was a bit more than last year. We jumped, (which for us means we actually saw the rabbit flush), forty-five rabbits and harvested twenty -four of them. This adds up to about a fifty percent success rate or as I like to call it, “maybe, maybe not.” Our average hunt lasted about three and a half hours and we averaged jumping about one and a third rabbit per hour. Just so you know, a third of a rabbit is hard to hit and is not really enough for supper either. We also averaged four dogs per and four hunters per outing. So how did the dogs do you ask? Well, Jack, Cherokee, and Sugar are good solid dogs and remained so the entire season. One of the new dogs, Sandy, started well with a good nose and “brush” desire, however as the season wore on her back and hips pained her a great deal and a couple hours hunting was all she could manage. Natalie, the other new dog, was a good-looking tri-color red tick dog but turned out to be a “babbler” or “cold tracker” and even with a training collar she would not cooperate. She spent the last half of the season in the kennel and will probably be relocated soon.

Much of the information I used in this article I obtained from my rabbit-hunting log that I kept voluntarily for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, KDFWR. This hunting log is one of the few and probably the best way for KDFWR to keep track of rabbit reproduction and harvest trends. You can print the form out from their website and it only takes a few seconds to fill it out after each hunt and it doesn’t hurt a bit. I kept mine on the dash of my truck and filled it out at the end of the hunt while I let the truck warm up. The best part is if you send in a completed log at the end of the season they will send you a small game survey cooperator hat. Free! I like free stuff.

This wrap up wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the loss of a friend, mentor, and hunting companion, Bill Biddle. I knew him as one of the earliest bowfishermen in the county, a black powder enthusiast, and a bow hunter of considerable merit. He was a rabbit hunter and a beagle man that I held in high regard. He will be missed.