Loads of them…
Loads of them….
First published in Earth Dog Running Dog Magazine (2014)
A few years back I had a call from a man who had got my number from the huntsman of the Beagle pack I hunted with at the time and he said he was having a serious rabbit problem and could I help him out at all. I said I would be happy to but I wasn’t sure when I would get to him as he was 3 hours away. Thankfully I never have to travel too far for a bit of sport, but although sometimes when I get an invite from friends or something I don’t mind a bit of a drive and it’s always good to see different ground and get a bit farther from home now and again. The man called me again that same week and said that he was at his wits end and could I possibly get up that coming weekend. Stupidly I said I would try and sort something out and when Friday evening arrived I was hammering up the motorway, dogs and ferrets loaded to stay with a mate who lived nearby, if there are plenty of rabbits to be had then distance doesn’t really come into it. I screeched into the farmer’s yard about 9 that night and he bundled us into a jeep and took off across the fields. I had a lamp with me and as we rumbled along lanes and through fields I kept waiting on the rabbits to run across or appear in the lights as they usually do, but they never came. “Where are you having the problem” I asked. Everywhere, look at that barley it’s eaten right down. It was damaged in places but not eaten out in the half circles that rabbits like to make. “This field here below the lane is bad” he said as we went through a gate. I light up the field with the light force and saw one set of ruby eyes looking back at me and my mate poked me in the arm from the backseat! “There doesn’t seem to be many feeding tonight” I said to the farmer, “There are plenty believe me, the grass is eaten to the ground in places. He drove, and drove for another hour pointing out everywhere that had rabbits and the only problem I saw was there were no rabbits!
Eventually he arrived back in the yard and we told him we would take the dogs across the farm for a few hours, maybe try the long nets along the lower fields and return for an early start in the morning. As soon as he left my mate began to laugh, “More rabbits in my back garden” he said and I laughed along with him. “Maybe they only come out in the daytime” he joked again. The problem was I had two more lads coming along for the day in the morning and another lad who had been asking me about taking some photographs of the lurchers working with the nets for a project he was doing. So here I was with a squad lined up for the morning, there would be enough dogs, ferrets and nets here at 7.00am to cover Australia, we were all pumped for what was to be a big day and there we were and hardly a bloody rabbit on the entire place!
My mate and I leashed up the Lurchers and set off into the darkness. We walked, and walked and eventually spotted a rabbit sitting out on a ploughed field which the dog quickly snapped up and returned. “That’s them all gone” my mate joked again. But it was far from a joke and I was beginning to think he wasn’t far wrong! All the way up the road I had images in my mind of bagging rabbits by the ton and he we were having trouble bagging 2. We walked the entire place several times and saw next to nothing, “sack it for tonight” I said and we will get a better look in the daylight.
7.00am came too quickly and we took the 10 minute drive to the yard again, my friends and the photographer were already there and raring to go. It was a lovely morning, really calm, cool and very frosty. The lads were keen to go, the photographer was loading all sorts of lenses and bags and tripods onto him and asked were we likely to get a few rabbits to which my mate started laughing and said he and we had caught them all last night, and it was in the van!
I told the lads what had happened the night before, and I didn’t think we were in for much of a day but we would take a look. By 8.30 it was even more obvious that there was almost no rabbits on the farm at all, and bordered by a canal on one side and a motorway on the other it was sort of land locked that the rabbits couldn’t even be travelling to feed on it. We found I think a total of two burrows and bolted a rabbit from each. We hunted through the cover, checked hedges and scratched about everywhere in the hope of finding a massive 200 hole burrow stuffed with rabbits but it just wasn’t there! “Never listen to farmers” my mate professed. “Full of nonsense the lot of them and anyway I know a place a few miles down the road we might get a few”. So we agreed with nothing doing here we would try the spot he knew down the road and maybe I wouldn’t have wasted a 6 hour round trip!
By now it was almost ten o’clock and the sun was getting well up, the frost dripping away and the two stubble ground we arrived on looked great in the sun. A large Ditch run up the middle for a couple of hundred yards and as I run out the net and looked at the spill from the holes and that familiar rabbit smell hung in the air I was hopeful for some better action here. I collared up 6 or so ferrets and the other lads did the same, the dogs hung well back and so did we and as the ferrets tasted the air and then made their way in, down and through the ditch. For the first half an hour or so all was quiet, a bump here and a rumble there, with the odd bolt into the net but as the ferrets worked their way in and out and eventually reached the halfway mark it all picked up pace a little. Rabbit after rabbit bolted, in twos and sometimes threes and the lurchers had their work cut out. The dogs would be holding one in the net when another would bolt, then another and it was really great sport. The photographer was swapping from one camera to the other and getting up on fence posts and lying down and getting into all sorts of positions, looking very David Bailey! At that time I had a really good team of ferrets, something which I can’t claim to own now. For many years, I stupidly didn’t breed any of my ferrets and had them jabbed every year as I was happy with what I had and stupidly never thinking of the future. I didn’t want the hassle of kits and trying to find homes for them, there are far too many ferrets bred and scattered about every summer and I wasn’t going to add to them, and anyway I had decent ferrets and enough of them to do me, until I lost one, then another and had one or two die and had a few remaining all which seemed to drop off one after the other and I realised that those same ferrets were all 7 or 8 years old and many had hardly a tooth left, I had let them all get too old and left myself with next to nothing. I tried to breed two of my old ones two years ago but they didn’t take, I changed hobs and tried again last year but still to no avail and then only months ago one died, she was nine years old and I know because I have a photograph of her on top of the hutch and she was just a small kit. I have never named ferrets but she got the name Badger and I don’t know when or why but it stuck with her and I know some people find it a bit soft to be sentimental about a ferret but she really was a good one. That left me one jill from my old breeding and I mated her this year with a small good working little Hob gifted to me by a friend a few years ago, she has gone out of season and hopefully has taken, so if and when there are a litter of kits born I will keep half a dozen or more, and give whatever remains to my friends Greg and Andy.
Ferrets have it a lot better now than they used to. I remember well the first pair I got as a child from a local man. He used to sell them for £3 each or two for a fiver, there was no delvestrone injections to bring them out of season and they were bred sometimes twice over the summer. No rabbit or fresh meat but a terrible diet of eggs, bread and milk three times a week was there lot and he bred as many as he could in the summer to sell. At that time I did as he told me and my ferrets were fed eggs, bread and milk on a Monday, Wednesday and not on a Friday as they were hunting on a Saturday. Then they got fed on Saturday night again and then not until monday. I’m almost embarrassed to write that, but that was the advice I got from an “expert” at 8 or 9 years old. What a life for a ferret hey? Any wonder they used to lay up for hours every time I was out!
As the photographer clicked away the day soon started to darken, those winter days don’t last long and as all of you know will know as soon as it hits three o’clock or just after the daylight starts to go very quickly. By this stage we had worked the entire ditch up and down a few times and the ferrets had given their best. We wound up on the corner of the ditch with a ferret in a few feet with a rabbit stopped up, the first and only dig of the day surprisingly. It didn’t take long to get down and when we did I extracted the most unusual looking pair of rabbits I ever saw. They were a strange blue colour with very black eyes; I never saw anything like them before or since. As the light fell we took in the nets and gutted the rabbits and I put some food into each couple of ferrets in the boxes as they had a long day and had been travelling since the previous night. While we were packing up the farmer rang me and asked that I stop by for a “Debrief” as he called it and we swung by enroute to the motorway. “You get many”? He enquired. We had about three dozen in total and I thought it was a pretty good day. I opened my van and showed him the pile in the back. “Is that all? You will have to come back a day and try again”.
Out of three dozen, 35 of them were caught two miles up the road, he had no problem with rabbits but I didn’t bother trying to convince him, we had a good day anyway and he was none the wiser. Some weeks later the young photographer sent me a disc with photos on it and a letter thanking me for letting him tag along. The farmer did ring me a few times after that again and I asked if there was plenty about, “Loads of them” he said!