Thanksgiving hunt No. 2: Kicking out rabbit(s)

My neighbor and I try to sneak in at least one or two mornings or evenings each year for rabbit hunting

As you can see, we hunt nice cover. And, as you can see, there’s a reason blaze orange is required for small game hunting. That’s Norm Koster barely visible on the other side of our first ditch.

Our dream is that we will roust a wild rooster.

We’re hunting some of Norm’s family farmland and nearby cover. And he remembers as a kid how many pheasants and rabbits they would see 30 or so years ago..

Times have changed.

We’re usually grateful to bag a few rabbits. In the seven or eight years we have been doing a small game hunt, we have yet to kick out a pheasant.

That’s kind of discouraging.

Friday afternoon started fine. I kicked out a rabbit about 50 yards into our first fencerow along a ditch beside a small field still producing greens for market. I kicked a brushpile and the rabbit squirted back and into the ditch before I could fire.

That was the only rabbit we saw. And we pushed hard for three hours, working off some of that Thanksgiving feed. On the other hand, we saw all kinds of coyote and deer tracks, something that wasn’t common 30 years ago.

Times change.

It was time.

On the way home, we drove by another patch of greens that one farmer told us was full of rabbits. For future reference. It looked the same as some of the cover we had kicked out earlier. Another day.