John’s Note: If you enjoy hearing the music of a pack of tri-colored hounds as they work the briars and brambles, then you’ve surely dreamed about hunting when deer season ends. Then rabbit dogs no longer will disturb deer hunters in the woods. Whether you hunt rabbits in marshes and swamps or along edges of green fields, get prepared for February fun, while rabbit hunting.
If you can find an area where farmers have cut soybeans that have drainage ditches in the middles of the soybean fields or briar thickets on the edges of the soybean fields, you often can get your limit of rabbits by putting-on a rabbit drive.
I like to hunt little strips of briars or thick cover, about 30-yards wide and 100-yards long with fields on either side of them. By walking three hunters abreast, you can stump the briars and bump the bunnies out of the cover. Most often the rabbits won’t run straight away from you but will run to the left or to the right. With this tactic, each hunter drives the rabbits toward the other hunters. As you bump the bunnies out of the cover, they’ll often run to the edges of the field and then dart back into the thicket, giving the two hunters on either edge plenty of shooting. If those hunters miss the rabbits, the hunter in the middle of the drive generally may take a bunny. You’ll also find bumping bunnies a productive way to hunt rabbits when you don’t have a pack of good beagles.
You also can discover large rabbit populations for hunting on many states’ wildlife management areas. With plentiful green fields and wildlife openings planted for deer and turkey, they also provide suitable habitat for cottontails. Rabbit hunters and their beagle dogs have changed the places they locate rabbits and the ways they hunt. And, today hunters probably bag more bunnies than in past years. To find more rabbits in your area, look for and hunt wildlife openings and green fields planted primarily for white-tailed deer and turkeys and scout the swamplands and marshes for rabbits.
For delicious recipes for preparing rabbits and other wild game with our family’s recipes from the past 45+ years in the outdoors, get John and Denise Phillips’ new eBook “The Best Wild Game & Seafood Cookbook Ever: 350 Southern Recipes for Deer, Turkey, Fish, Seafood, Small Game and Birds.” “Click here to get these books.”
About the Author
John Phillips, winner of the 2012 Homer Circle Fishing Award for outstanding fishing writer by the American Sportfishing Association (AMA) and the Professional Outdoor Media Association (POMA), the 2008 Crossbow Communicator of the year and the 2007 Legendary Communicator chosen for induction into the National Fresh Water Hall of Fame, is a freelance writer (over 6,000 magazine articles for about 100 magazines and several thousand newspaper columns published), magazine editor, photographer for print media as well as industry catalogues (over 25,000 photos published), lecturer, outdoor consultant, marketing consultant, book author and daily internet content provider with an overview of the outdoors.
