Eastern Cottontail Rabbits: Tastes Like Invasive Chicken

I love hunting rabbits.  I think I have more fun hunting rabbits than any other species.  The other game animals that I regularly hunt; mainly black-tailed deer and black bears; are a bit more of a serious matter.  That's not to say that I don't have fun hunting them, I absolutely do, but I find that there's a different mindset that accompanies the pursuit of large game.  Figuring out their habits, their schedules, their preferred food sources, the terrain they inhabit; it's like studying a subject that you really enjoy.  I find that I want to learn everything I can about them, not just things that can help me track them down and successfully hunt them.  I like to read about their life-cycles, their reproduction, their history in both the environment that they currently inhabit, as well as their historical ranges; their origins and their rises and their falls and their resurgences.  There's a reverence that I have for these animals that compels me to know them as well as I can.  I feel like I'm taking a lifelong course on deer and bears; and when I hunt them, it's like the laboratory portion of the course.  I put my knowledge to the test, and hope that it's sufficient for success; but even when it isn't (and it frequently isn't) I almost always come away with something new that I can put into practice for next time.  

When I hunt rabbits, on the other hand, I just want to take my 12-gauge out and shoot some rabbits.  There's a certain joy in hunting them that I equate with the feeling you get as an adult fisherman when you go back and spend a couple hours fishing for perch and sunfish like you did as a kid.  There's not a lot of calculating and planning and careful studying of maps and topography going on.  When I go out to hunt Eastern Cottontail rabbits, not far from where I live, I know exactly where I'm going (it's about a five minute drive, followed by an equal-length walk) and I know exactly the procedure to follow when I get there.  I was lucky enough to discover a couple of pockets of these rabbits out in the woods while deer hunting over the last few years.  I know of two distinct little populations, and each seems to only inhabit a small area that individuals rarely stray from.  Like little rabbit fishing holes.

There are no native species of rabbit here on Vancouver Island.  Eastern Cottontails are an invasive species, introduced near Sooke, on the southern tip of the island, in 1964.  They have since spread northward, along the less-rugged eastern side of the island, as far as Campbell River.  They tend to exist close to human population centres, as far as I have observed; I've never spotted one in the real deep woods.  They seem to exist on the edge of where suburbs give way to the beginning of the wild, but they don't seem capable of taking that plunge into the actual backcountry forest.  They most likely get picked off pretty quickly if they get too far away from where the human umbrella shields them from predation.  As its name suggests, the Cottontail pretty much has a white flag attached to its butt that flashes every time it moves, so it's not the subtlest of prey species.  Its two choices of self-defense are to run, which usually just allows the hunter or animal predator to locate it more easily; or to sit perfectly still with its ears flat against its head and hope nothing notices it.  This works surprisingly well when the rabbit is sitting in the brush on the edge of a trail, which is where I normally find them, but it doesn't work as well when the animal is out in the open in the middle of the trail, with nothing for its camouflage to blend with.  That's where I normally shoot them.

As an invasive species, the Eastern Cottontail is classified as a Schedule 'C' animal under the BC Wildlife Act,  meaning it may be hunted anywhere, at any time, by any method, even without a hunting license.  So that's pretty helpful to the enthusiastic rabbit hunter.  At any time, one can set out to hunt Eastern Cottontails on a whim.  And I frequently do.  I normally get the idea in my head the night before, and so I set my alarm clock for about one hour after sunrise the following morning.  The rabbits seem to be at the peak of their activity once the sun has been out for a short period of time.  I noticed this while hunting deer; there would be no rabbits on the trail on my way in to my deer hunting spots in the dim light of the pre-dawn morning, but on my way back out of the woods a few hours later, I'd see them every time.  When I get up early in the morning with the express purpose of hunting rabbits, it gives me a feeling of goofy excitement like no other animal does.

A week ago, I got up early on a Monday morning for just such a hunt.  I had been on a black bear hunt over the weekend, without any success, and wanted to put that behind me and get back into the win column, so a rabbit hunt seemed natural.  Part of the reason why hunting rabbits is so much fun is that it's like a bunch of big game hunts played out in miniature, and a new one begins as soon as the last one ends.  I even use all the same strategies with rabbits that people use with large animals: spot and stalk, still hunting, and ambush.  Last Monday, I rolled up to the rabbit trail, loaded my shotgun as I walked up the dirt path, and commenced my excursion with a little still hunting.  I walked through the area that I knew held rabbits in it as slowly and purposefully as I could, making as little noise as possible.  I was able to do this in part thanks to my standard choice of hiking footwear: really well-worn Adidas sneakers.  When I say well-worn, I mean the soles are about half a millimetre thick, and have several holes.  You can walk on the crunchiest dry ground with them, and it's like you're wearing leather-soled moccasins.  If I were a more skilled shotgunner, the rabbits would have no chance at all with me wearing my lucky Adidas hunting boots.  Fortunately for them, my confidence level with a 12-gauge limits me to a range of rabbit motion that starts at "stock-still," and ends at "barely moving."  About 20 minutes into my hunt, and after a few sightings and almost-chances, a bunny hopped out onto the trail about 35 yards ahead of me, and I was able to line him up and capitalize.  I still get just as irrationally excited about pulling the trigger on a cottontail as I was for my first-ever kill of a game animal when I was a kid.  Deer and bears, I've learned to (mostly) control my feelings with, but rabbits pull it out of me every time.  I walked up to the critter after the shot, and took a look at it to make sure it had all the signs of a healthy animal.  Clear eyes, nice full pelt, no sores or pus or anything of that sort.  You want to check over small game animals like rabbits and squirrels for any evidence of disease; I've yet to come across any problems with cottontails on the island, but it doesn't take much for an illness to spread quickly through a population of animals that live in such close proximity to each other as rabbits.  You can also have a look at the animal's liver when you're gutting it; an even-coloured, purplish-brown organ is normal, while any kind of spotting or blotchiness is a warning sign that you should toss that rabbit in the bin.  This particular specimen was just perfect.

Soon after my first success of the morning, I got a chance to practice a little bit of bunny spot and stalk, as I spied one way down a long, straight section of trail, about 75 yards away.  I like to be within about 40 yards for a clean, humane kill, so I had to make up some distance, which I did by staying close to the edge of the trail to keep myself partially obscured by brush.  If they see any motion, or hear anything at all, they're usually gone in a split second.  I crept up closer each time the rabbit turned away to nibble on some greenery growing up through the middle of the track, and soon closed to a comfortable shooting distance.  I shot him right from around the 40-yard mark, and then ran up to retrieve him.  They're an interesting-looking little rabbit, with brownish-grey fur that's exactly the same colour as the brush they like to inhabit, and curiously small ears for a rabbit, which gives them sort of a chinchilla look.  That ended up being last last critter of the morning for me, as the rest were too wily or too quick, and their window of activity passes pretty swiftly.  They seem to shut it right down through the late morning and the middle of the day, and then come out again for another brief window at the last light of the day.  Two rabbits was plenty for me, though, because combined with a nice beefy one that I had shot the weekend prior, I now have enough bunny meat in the freezer to make either a rabbit ragu, or a hasenpfeffer stew; I haven't decided which to go with yet, but when I do, I'll post it up, and you can check out how it comes together.