Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Rabbit explosion

Or this ........

I hear that Weimaraners especially like to ride in vehicles, so the extensive travel is not going to be a problem... Ha! :-)

You need to get that puppy!

John (an enabler in Sweden)

Nice shot. I haven't used a blow gun in years. I do hunt with a slingshot, but I'm not killing local rabbits. Instead, I am trapping them, and releasing them on my hunting property.
We had a blizzard here back in '76 or '78 that killed off @90% of the local rabbits. We had no open seasons for 10 years, and still have far fewer rabbit than we used to.
Snow shoe hares are being reintroduced, and protected, and some folks are breeding thier own eating rabbits.

I have noticed the same on my homestead, more rabbits than usual, they seem to be everywhere this year! I am hopeful for a productive season this winter.

More rabbits than usual, still not enough of them to start eating them though.

Rabbit over fire makes a fine meal.

I remember back in the 1970's when there was an explosion of rabbits in Mud Lake Idaho. We would go there on the weekends. If I recall, I think that I toasted 300+ in one day when I was a kid.

Was a lot of fun.

It wasn't just Mud Lake. It was all across so. Idaho. A rancher I knew back then took a photo of the rabbits around a hay stack. He had it enlarged and started counting, putting a black dot on each one. He gave it up at around 3000 and he was a long way from finished. They'd eat through the bottom bales on a haystack until it fell over. Those were jack rabbits, though, not cottontails. They crashed the next winter and have never come back even remotely close to those numbers, at least not here.

I don't see many woodchucks at all these days in New England!

Your profile shows you in NY where I used to hunt chucks. I shot a lot of chucks around Millerton NY decades ago.

You sure there are chucks there?

6'? Oh hell yeah! I was thinking one of those gun show blow guns...


DMc : )

Cottontails have roughly a 10 year cycle, snowshoes about 13. It can vary a couple years either way, depending on weather, predators, forage, how hard they crash, and maybe some other factors.

So wait a couple, protect your orchard and ornamental trees meanwhile, shoot the crap out of them, and you will be fine.

I always found interesting that a couple Canadian studies have shown that the number one predator on snowshoe hare babies under the age of 2 weeks is the little red pine squirrel.

One difference, (there are several) between hares and rabbits, is that rabbits keep their babies all in one nest, at first, while snowshoes stash their several babies singly in different locations. Dunno about Jacks. Those are hares also, right?

Slingshot.

The lost art....




Dave

No dog mark?
WTF?

That Blue Streak and skillet/pot will solve your problem.

I think elkhunternm explodes rabbits.

We have a lot of whitetail jack rabbits around here which are often mistaken for snowshoes. The mistake is so common that many people who've lived in the high desert all their lives don't even know there is a whitetailed jack. They think they're all snowshoes which don't live here at all. Whitetails live at higher elevations than blacktail jacks and turn white in the winter, which blacktails don't. Of course jacks are hares but I've never heard the term 'jack hare'.
Another difference between rabbits & hares is that hares have a 2 week longer gestation than rabbits so the young are born more fully developed. Rabbits are born naked and with their eyes closed while hares are born fully haired and with the eyes open. Hares are ready to leave the nest much sooner than rabbits. With some exceptions, rabbits nest in a burrow while hares just make a form, which is just a depression under a bush or something, to give birth.

I shoot them with my bow. Its quiet

We had a bunch around here the last couple of years, and they kept getting into my high tunnel and eating the crops in there. I'd wait until it got dark, take a light and a shotgun, and go kill a couple. After about a dozen bit the dust, they quit getting in there.

We were hiking in the hills north of Vernal, Ut. and spotted movement under some Junipers. I put my glasses on it and spotted the largest rabbit I have ever seen in the wild. I thought it might be a Snowshoe but when I looked it up it was a Whitetail Jack. I would bet they are better eating than Blacktails.


mike r

Where's the like button on this thing?

The differences between rabbits and hares are interesting. Did not know that. It has been my observation there is an inverse relationship between predators and rabbits. Probably applies to other prey animals as well but I have mostly noticed it with rabbits. As the population of predators increases, the population of rabbits decreases and vice versa. They never to seem to reach equilibrium but always changing and balance out over the long run.