~   Busting County Bunnies   ~

     There’s something romantic and challenging about donning those traditional and rawhide foot platters, easing through the evergreens on a crisp morning.

     Oddly enough, my first experience hunting bunnies came from shotgunning the hopping rodents in the bramble-and-hedge-lined moors of England. The ground dwellers would evade danger by darting down their burrow where they escaped not only a human hunter, but the fox and owl as well.     

     A colony of the alert, brown furballs would feed on the lush field grasses and at the sign of danger scramble en mass for their earthen sanctuaries. Hunting with rifles was illegal in that country, so a stealthy stalk into their midst followed by fast and furious scattergunning was the norm as they raced to their holes that postmarked the landscape like a western prairie dog colony.

     I learned that I could apply some of my foreign hunting experience to the northern latitude snowshoe hare. Like its across-the-ocean cousin, our varying hare will escape to the equivalent thickest cover, so I was conditioned to a quick swing and shot before my fleeing quarry disappeared. Stalking them while they sit motionless before they scramble was another learned experience. In almost every case the hare will see you first, so if you sight one and act as if you don’t see it, actually moving slowly to one side in a manner that does not pose a threat, you can get deceptively closer and align yourself for a more open shot. This technique works well for the rimfire rifle hunter.

     Early in the season, if the weather works in your favor, the snowshoes will be white before the first snow falls, or after the initial snow melts. Now the bunnies advertise themselves like neon signs, and by plinking them with a .22 you can collect a bag limit in no time. Come January and February in The County, the snow depth almost always requires snowshoes to hunt snowshoes. My preference is the bearpaw style, as busting through heavy brush is easier with the design. When you make out the concentration of hare tracks in the snow, and determine their customary trails, have your hunting partner bust the brush while you wait in ambush in their well-worn runways. They are an animal of routine, inclined to use the same path.

     Another trait of the snowshoe hare is that even in its retreat it will not range too far, eventually even circling back to where it was first discovered. I suggest that if you fail to locate the jumped bunny, return to the original sighting and you may find this creature of habit back in the same vicinity.

     Come March, the final month of the season, even up here in Aroostook County, the sun thaws the snow into a condensed weight-supporting pack with this melt crusting over with the night refreeze. I’ll typically still use snowshoes in case of soft spots, but going is much easier.

     Then bedded underneath a snow-draped conifer right out of a Christmas card scene there’s a white ball of fluff with a black marble eye peering back at you, confident that it’s pelage against the backdrop makes it invisible. The pride of having a keen eye and making that humane off-hand rifle shot is rewarded by a bunny slung over your shoulder. You continue on, pausing as much to absorb the sterile-white scenery, as in pursuit of the game animal that you cut your teeth on many years ago. In the stillness you note a twitch of an ear, broadening into a three-dimensional off-white, tint-contrasting silhouette. With your second marksman shot of the day you now have a brace of fine snowshoes. You get that feeling of satisfaction knowing that your acute senses distinguished something that you can’t explain why it caught your attention in the first place. You earn a woodsman’s confidence, honing observation skills that may one day isolate an out-of-place sun’s glint off of an antler tine in hardwood underbrush.

~Wayne Selfridge is a seasoned outdoorsman who has hunted and fished throughout the world as a military veteran. He works in law enforcement and also serves as the Sporting Journal's Northern Sales Manager. He is also a member of the Friends of Aroostook National Wildlife Refuge.

© 2000 Northwoods Sporting Journal