 HUNTING
WILD RABBIT FOOD
Use Hot Country Rabbit Hunting Tactics and Hunt High
Spots and Protected Places in the Floods
EDITOR’S NOTE: Large-scale farming has affected
rabbits in the South. Clearing vast tracts of woods
and swamps to plant agricultural crops has meant losing
much of the rabbits’ habitat. Even though the
hedge rows between these large fields have produced
outstanding rabbit hunting that season, in the past
few years, we’ve watched rabbit populations decline.
Rabbits, like all other wild species, must have a combination
of ample food and proper cover to survive. If an area
loses either one, bunnies just can’t flourish.
Throughout much of our region, farming practices have
changed. The small-plot family farm either has been
abandoned or replaced with big-field farms, which are
not conductive to rabbit hunting. So where can hunters
go to find plenty of bunnies? The answer’s quite
simple – anywhere you find an abundant food source
and cover to protect the rabbits. Let’s see if
we can define some rabbit-food hot spots and learn how
to hunt them.
 When
I think of hot-weather hunting for bunnies, Texas, New
Mexico and Florida immediately come to mind, since these
states have plenty of bunnies. When a drought swept
through the South a few years ago, I employed the hot-weather
tactics I’d learned elsewhere to my own state
of Alabama. When most of the countryside looks brown,
you will have a difficult time finding rabbit food.
However, often tender, young shoots that provide excellent
food for rabbits will grow around stock ponds, farm
ponds, creeks, rivers and streams. During one dry spell
we had in the early fall one year, some friends and
I went creek-hunting for bunnies. We wore hip boots,
used beagles and hunted down the edges of small creeks
that still had flowing water. The man with the dogs
waded in the middle of the creeks and took bunnies as
they ran or swam across the ankle-deep water. Divided
evenly on shore, the rest of us took stands, and shot
the rabbits as they came down the edges of the creeks.
If you begin to think like a rabbit and look for the
essentials they need to survive, you’ll discover
numbers of rabbit hot spots.
Hunt High Spots and Protected Places in the Floods:
 We
no longer know what normal weather conditions include
because of the unusual weather we’ve had in our
region in recent years, including the extremes of drought
and floods. Either condition is bad for rabbits as well
as people. When a food hits, people who live along the
flood plain must move out of their houses, go to higher
ground and find another way to earn a living in another
place. Although rabbits spend most of their lives within
a half-acre of land, when that land becomes water, like
the people who live on the flood plain, the rabbits
also have to move to survive. Therefore, any high-ground
place you pinpoint during flooded conditions that also
has food and cover probably will home a large number
of rabbits.
Some years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleared
out a woodlot I hunted every year on the edge of the
Tombigbee River that flowed through west-central Alabama
and made it into a spoilage dump. The engineers dug
up this 150-to 200-acre plot and built a dike around
it. Then the Corps pumped the material dredged up from
the Tombigbee River into this spoilage area while building
the Tenn-Tom Waterway. Each year dredging this region
usually took place in the early spring. Briars and grass
filled this diked spoilage area by late summer and  early
fall, making it ideal habitat for both rabbit and deer,
When the river flooded, you couldn’t reach the
spoilage area except by boat or canoe. However, because
this place had a high bank all around it to keep the
dredged material in, it also kept the water out. Then
when the flood waters came, this eyesore became a deer
and rabbit hot spot because of the abundant food in
the spoilage area. All along major river systems throughout
the country, you’ll find these spoilage regions.
Although the dikes holding sediment from the bottom
of the river are eyesores, once the grass and briars
begin to grow in these sites, they offer a smorgasbord
for cottontails and swamp rabbits, and a honeyhole for
the rabbit hunter.
TOMORROW: GO TO THE GRASS
|
