Rabbits

I've been out deer stalking four nights in the last two weeks, and I've seen nothing. Well, nothing in season or nothing that I could get a safe shot at. There's some space in freezer again, so I took the soft option last night: a bit of bunny hunting.

Rabbits are not a taxing prey, as the fields are carpeted with rabbits of all ages and sizes at the moment. You could kick a stone and hit one. And it doesn't require any real fieldcraft - just warm clothes, a shotgun and good sea legs for standing in the back of a moving truck. A sense of humor helps too.

My dear old Dad gave me a new 12 bore semi-auto shotgun as a wedding present (Mike's tried not to read anything into this, though he's been on his best behavior since it arrived). It's my first semi-auto and it's taken some getting used to. It came with an extended mag so I can cram in 10 cartridges at a time.

This is the perfect back-of-the-truck rabbiting gun, when aiming becomes more of an aspiration than a likelihood. It's dark, the truck is bumping around in all directions. You see a bunny in the light and you try to follow it with the gun while trying to stay standing, and the spare tire keeps slamming into your ankles, your hip bones are banging into the metal bar that you're trying to lean against for support, and all the spilled wheat you're stood on makes it all a bit slippery underfoot. Hence, the sense of humor.

Pete the underkeeper and I did the shooting, while Mike drove and shone the light out on the fields looking for rabbits and foxes. Mike has a system for alerting us to rabbits he thinks we haven't seen: waving the light wildly and beeping the horn (what did I tell you about no fieldcraft needed?) Pete brought a rifle in case of a chance at a long-range fox, and I brought the semi-auto for bunny harvesting. As there we're no foxes and lots of bunnies, Pete and I took turns with the semi-auto. We managed 13 bunnies between us before we ran out of ammunition, about one rabbit per 3.5 shots. I don't think that's bad going when you take into account all the factors.

Pete and Mike gave me a refresher lesson in gutting rabbits. I am officially rubbish at it. By the time I'd opened one rabbit, Pete had opened the other twelve.

There is a simple technique for cleaning them, which is 'The Flick': grab the head and the back feet and flick the body away from you, like you were snapping a towel. Eveything but the liver / kidneys comes out in one clean package. Neat huh? It takes a bit of practice to master.

My first flick was more of a 'flump' - everything came out but plopped on my feet. I put some oomph into the next one, but swung instead of flicked, and covered Mike all up his left side in unmentionables. Seems I'm better at the butchering than the field dressing. Thankfully, I excel at getting blood stains out of Mike's shirts.

I took off all the prime, unshot rabbit loins and thigh meat this morning while I was waiting for Nigel the hedgelayer to meet me. He's going to clear the weeds and lay what's left of the thorn hedges on the road boundary of Milkweed farm. We checked all through the overgrown hedge to make sure there were no nesting birds, as it's getting late in the season. All clear, so we'll get on with that next week. Ted the woodsman cleared the willows out of the dew pond which gives us access to extract water for the livestock.

The cleared pond

While we were looking for nests, Nigel and I got to talking chickens, as usual. Nigel told me that he dowses all his hatching eggs to find out which are the hens and which are the cocks. He kindly showed me how it's done:

- Thread a needle on a piece of cotton (thread) and tie the ends so you've got a needle hanging on the end of a 7"ish loop.

- Lay your egg on its side and touch the egg with the point of your needle. Lift the needle so it hangs just above the egg a 1/2" or so
- Be patient. Soon the needle will start to move above the egg. If it moves back and forth in a straight line, it's a cock. If it does little circles either direction, it's a hen. If it doesn't do anything then it's infertile.

I had a half dozen bantam eggs in the pantry and under Nigel's guidance I dowsed the eggs. The needle tells me I have 3 hens, 2 cocks, and 1 infertile. I set some Silkie eggs in the incubator this morning and there was a little room left, so I put the 3 potential hen eggs in. In a few months, I will see if I have 'the touch', or if my dowsing skills are on par with my rabbit gutting skills.

Nigel took on the remains of my butchered rabbits to bait his fox traps and feed the magpies in his catchers. Have I not mentioned that it's crow and magpie trapping time? How we use a 'Judas' bird and a spring loaded trap door to catch maurading corvids? Stay tuned for the next post...

Hunting and Gathering, and an Unexpected Arrival

As I finished my blog post yesterday, I got a phone call from our chef friend Gordy in a panic, desperate for rabbits by that evening. He had a catering function and the menu said 'rabbit and foie gras terrine' and he was short the 'rabbit' part. Could I pop out and shoot him a few? I can't resist the pleadings of a mate in need (and it was a good excuse to put off mowing the lawn yet again) but it was mid morning on a windy day. This was not good rabbiting time or weather.

I tried all the hot spots which are usually carpeted in rabbits but after an hour driving around and stalking some burrows on a hillside, this was the sum total of my mid morning hunt:

I gave him my one fresh rabbit and my last frozen rabbit meat. I hope it was enough for the terrine.

It's been a quiet Saturday and after the animals were seen to, we thought we had better start gathering some of the wild hedgerow fruits before the birds beat us to it. The back of Mike's work truck makes an excellent mobile picking platform.

We picked sloes today, for sloe gin of course. Last year's batch has been drunk already (..ahem...) and there's another batch ageing in the pantry. Both were from sloes frozen two years ago. Last year was a terrible year for wild fruit and it was nearly impossible to find some in any reasonable quantity. Plus, in the bad years I think of the birds and animals that need it more than we do. Hence, we will make hay while the sun shines - or gin while the sloes are ripe and abundant, as the case may be. And we will pick a few extra pounds for the freezer, just in case.

We picked until it was time to feed the horses and check the birds at The Hill again. We stopped home for a quick cup of tea (gamekeeper fuel) and heard the recognisable cries of a lost chick. We checked both mother hens, then I remembered Gertie. Gertie is the little pekin who went broody on a dummy egg left in a nest to encourage the chickens to lay eggs there. She was so doggedly broody, I took pity on her and popped a few bantam eggs I'd found in a hidden nest (obviously nobody told that chicken about the whole dummy egg principle). I didn't even know if they were viable .

Turns out at least one was. And it has a terrible sense of direction. We found it wandering outside the chicken house, headed for the dog kennels. It's been reunited with its inattentive mother, and I knocked together a makeshift broody coop around the pair. We will keep our fingers crossed for the 2 or 3 siblings that may yet hatch.