HOW TO HAVE A PROPER BUNNY HUNT

Hunt Deer To Locate Rabbits

Editor's Note: Numbers of outdoorsmen have grown up hunting rabbits, wily creatures that can teach you many hunting skills. If you live in the South, you already know the difficulty of hunting rabbits in places with overpopulations of white-tailed deer. But you can have a proper, successful bunny hunt. Here's how.

Rabbits and deer feed on many of the same grasses and shrubs. Although deer primarily browse and eat bushes, shrubs and young trees, deer also like tender green shoots of grass. The rabbit will eat almost any type of leaves or grass that grows. Oftentimes where you find ideal deer habitat, you'll discover productive rabbit hunting. Sitting on the edge of a green field at White Oak Plantation near Tuskegee, Alabama, a couple of years ago, I watched 15 deer feeding just as night fell. With my binoculars, I scanned the green field looking for the trophy buck that a hunter often would find on the edge of a field until shooting light was almost gone and that then would move quietly like a mist out into the clearing. Although I didn't spot my dream buck, I did see large numbers of rabbits coming from the woods and going into the green fields. I realized the rabbits didn't know this green field was planted for deer and probably thought it was planted for them.

When I arrived back at camp that night, I talked with Robert Pitman, the owner of White Oak, about the possibility of hunting rabbits around his green fields at the end of deer season. When we did hold a rabbit hunt a couple of weeks later, we found the bunnies abundant, as I'd believed we would. To locate rabbits throughout your region, look on the edges of green fields planted for deer. You often can predict the kind of rabbits you'll discover around these green fields by where the field lies. If the green field is planted in or near a pine plantation or a clear-cut, generally you'll have cottontails to hunt. However, if that planted green field lies in swampy terrain or on the edge of a creek or a river, primarily swamp rabbits may utilize that field. You also can pinpoint productive rabbit and deer hunting in the middle of a pine plantation. Often the firebreaks, the wildlife openings and the green fields planted for deer as well as the roads leading around and through the pine plantation will be planted with some types of low-growing grasses on which rabbits thrive. Remember, all a rabbit must have to survive is food and cover. If rabbits can find those ingredients in a young pine plantation or on the edge of a pine plantation, that's where the rabbits will live.

To learn more about White Oak Plantation's quality hunting for many species, call (334) 727-9258, or go to www.whiteoakplantation.com.

TOMORROW: FIND RAILRAOD TRACK AND HIGH-VOLTAGE RABBITS