Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Lack of rabbits around here

Cottontails seem to ebb and flow around here but the peaks doesn't get as high as they used to.
Coyote #'s are on the upswing and raptors fill the sky.
See more rabbits right up against our house than anywhere else on the property and none on the two farms I hunt even though the habitat is perfect.

I've always heard that they follow 10 year cycles, but who knows.

Since fur prices collapsed to nothing we are overrun with raccoons and opossum. Reckon maybe they eat baby rabbits? I know they will kill a hen sitting on a nest and eat eggs or chicks.

This is the problem. The 7 year cycle story is a myth passed down without merit. I have hunted rabbits for over 30 years and never observed any 7 year cycle. As a matter of fact, I have hunted rabbits in the same season and seen dozens one day and hardly a rabbit the next.

I won’t argue that different years produced different numbers of rabbits, but no cycle. Enter the golden eagle and all of a sudden things have changed. Since the rebound of raptors, and that is unchecked and protected, the rabbits have been scarce.

Eagles and grizzly bears need a season on them…

Take out the part about seeing three of them, and you've described Iowa exactly.

They leave my yard, in a cage.

Rabbit populations are cyclic. Some years they are under every bush and then the population crashes and rebuilds for several years and then gets to the point where it crashes again. Been happening for millions of years.

The last jackrabbit I saw in Iowa was a very cold winter night just north of Ankeny. It was a full moon night and this guy was setting in a cut bean field. It must of been January of 2005. That spot is now covered in a U-Store it business. There used to be jack rabbits around the John Deere plant on the west side of Ankeny until John Deere started mowing up every inch of grass outside of the fence. That was around 1990. I'm pretty sure they are all gone now.

kwg

Guys it’s not the raptors and hawks. Lol. Honestly their numbers are way down in the areas I go to. Their numbers are supported by rabbits bugs etc. no rabbits bugs, no raptors or hawks. I can actually tell the relative pray population in an area by what I see flying around. Nothing flying around no pray, and by extension no predators.

I cover 3 thousands miles of high desert trails a year. The grim reaper started in 2018. We had a damp summer this year which helped the coyotes but they have been eating mainly bugs. Come winter there will not be bugs, crickets hoppers to eat. It’s really been spotty. Some areas are very dry waste lands. No birds, no rabbits, no coyotes. Other areas are coming back,

In urban and semi-urban areas both feral and domestic pet cats allowed outside put a BIG hurtin' on cottontail litters, young squirrels, and quail, too. A cat's nature is to just kill stuff regardless whether they are hungry or not.

shrapnel;
Top of the morning to you Kirk, I trust the day looks at very least promising for you and all those you care about.

With the understanding that I have no biology degree - or any other degree for that matter - I'd have to say I agree with your thoughts on specific cycles.

If I was guessing, I'd guess that the "seven year" thing is somewhat linked to Biblical stories, as my late Father and some of my other mentors of that vintage would suggest specific timelines to game population cycles.

When I was a kid in Saskatchewan the snowshoe hare populations would certainly cycle up and down, as did the jackrabbit cycles - along with the whitetails and everything else - but I felt it was more tied to the harshness of the winters there combined with predator populations.

Going into the rhubarb just a tiny bit, when my late Father was a kid in the same area of Saskatchewan, he related how they might see a single deer every 4 or 5 years all the way into the late 1950's. They did have a lot of jackrabbits and snowshoes in those years however.

Oh, and no moose, black bears or mule deer and I never saw more than a single bull moose one time before we left farming in '84. In conversation with my brother who is still farming there, he's seen up to 5 bull moose in one slough now, black bears are becoming more and more common and mule deer moved in from the south and west about 5 years ago so now they're common.

Here in BC, our winter snow levels and the amount of time the snow stays, combined with how wet the spring is, seem to me to be a major factor in small game populations. Of course it goes without saying that predator populations are a huge factor as well, but for instance when the wolves moved in and pretty much cleaned out the whitetails up behind the house and drove the remaining mulies, elk and moose elsewhere, eventually they must have eaten themselves out of house and home as we don't see as much wolf sign now.

Finally too of course Kirk, it didn't hurt that the MoE gave us a pretty generous wolf season so folks started to thin them whenever possible too, though I can't say I know of too many personally who shot wolves. For sure though, if we're going to manage anything logically, we'll need to assess both the pressure put on the prey and the predator side and then set seasons accordingly.

All the best to you all and good hunting.

Dwayne

Funny how we have a lot of them in my yard.

Too dry this year maybe?

Predators, both ground predators and those in the sky. Used to be mainly red tail hawks around here now seeing 3-5 eagles a day isn't that uncommon. Owls are probably worse on rabbits than any other feathered critter.

We can't kill raptors for some stupid reason but we control 4 legged land predators??

We have 2 species of jacks here, blacktail and whitetail. The blacks live in the flat desert, the whites live in the hills. Whites turn white in the winter and are often mistaken for snowshoes. They're hares, though, while snowshoes are rabbits.
The numbers of both are way down and have been for years. It's common to drive 5 to 10 miles at night on desert roads and only see 1 or 2 blacks.

Yep, or they may have migrated enmass last year if the food ran out. I was hunting them once when hundreds were traveling through the area. Dad was hunting about a half mile away across the creek that same evening and never saw one.

Dwayne,

Thanks for your continued perspective. No one on the campfire holds a candle to your courtesy and presentation, I applaud you.

Rabbits, however, I will continue to dismiss the cyclic stuff, as I haven't seen it in over 3 decades of hunting them throughout most of those winters. I have seen some years better than others, but I have also seen back to back great years and back to back lean years. I doubt anyone here has shot more than we have and over the years I can unequivocally say, there is more to the decline in rabbits than any cycle theory.

For the past 5 years, I have not been able to find many, if any rabbits in all those places I used to shoot dozens in a day...

I expect there is not a great shortage of rabbits or Jack's all over their range, but there are big areas with very few after normal die offs which are normal after populations get too high to be supported by the environment.

Animals weakened by lack of food succumb easily to disease and weather. I've seen this country covered with both at times and then their disappearance.

About 5 years ago while dove hunting in mid Sept west of Andrew's the country was stinking with quail and bunnies.

Mid October we had a week long cool spell with clouds/rain/mist and no sunshine for six days. Quail season started Nov 6.

Hunted with Babe all day and saw 2 quail and busted 2 cottontails from heavy cover.


Last year there were no quail or bunnies on the hard ground West of Monahans/Kermit but a few miles farther west in the red sand semi-desert they were thick.

I didn't hunt after the season opener for 4 weeks due to warm weather and the snakes. A bad cold spell hit and 2 weeks later there were almost none of any to be found.

I've seen die offs several times in the past 40 years when there were bad flu seasons.

Yeah, I know and don't care to hear it.

Shrapnel, I agree with you as I also have seen back to back great years and back to back bad years and my experience with the bunnies only extends to Texas and eastern NM.

I've seen the same with squirrel in East Texas.

I note that in low spots in this country with small dense areas of mesquite with bases less than about 2 inches thick and that when the rabbits are thick and it looks like the bark has been stripped from most of the "saplings" the population fall is not far away.

When most bunnies in the country are gone it seems to me its going to take 3-4 years to have decent populations.

Of course, in this country there are frequent droughts which means sometimes there is no significant forage for 2 or 4 years.

Armadillo eat bunny eggs?