HOW TO HAVE A PROPER BUNNY HUNT

Find Railroad Track and High-Voltage Rabbits

Editor's Note: Numbers of outdoorsmen have grown up hunting rabbits, wily creatures that can teach you many hunting skills. If you live in the South, you already know the difficulty of hunting rabbits in places with overpopulations of white-tailed deer. But you can have a proper, successful bunny hunt. Here's how.

Throughout much of the country, you'll find abandoned railroad tracks. Most of the time when builders make railroad beds, they'll build the tracks on some type of mound above the surrounding ground level. In many areas along the edges of these old, abandoned railroad tracks, you'll find briar and high grass thickets which rabbits dearly love. When I hunted with my favorite rabbit hunting buddy, Mel Stewart of Dora, Alabama, who owns Morrow Creek Kennels, we found some outstanding beagle-dog bunny hunting along an abandoned railroad track in the southern part of my state. "John, I like to hunt railroad tracks because a hunter can stand on the side of the roadbed, look down in the cover and see the bunnies when they move," Stewart told me. "Another hunter can stand on the opposite side of that thick cover and spot the rabbits as they break to come out of the thicket.

"My favorite railroad tracks to hunt are abandoned railroad beds that go through farm country or that run along the edges of creeks or parallel to old roads. If you can locate one of these places that also has a clearing on the opposite side of the roadbed, you usually can discover plenty of bunnies. If your dogs like to jump deer and run them, you quickly and easily can get ahead of your dogs if you see a whitetail instead of a cottontail, when hunting abandoned railroad tracks. My dogs have the advantage of being raised and trained to be deer-proof. When I rabbit hunt, I don't want to spend time catching up to dogs that are chasing deer instead of rabbit hunting. I prefer to devote all my time to chasing rabbits." However, if you plan to hunt railroad-track rabbits, make sure the railroad tracks no longer have trains on them and that no law in your state prohibits hunting a certain distance from railroad tracks. Many states allow hunting on the right-of-ways on the sides of abandoned railroad tracks. But the right-of-ways on the edges of railroad tracks still in use cannot be hunted in most states. Check with your state's Department of Conservation.

Search For High-Voltage Bunnies:
You'll often locae some of the best rabbit hunting ever along the right-of-ways with electrical power lines over them. Because of the regular clearing of powerline right-of-ways, new growth of young grasses, close to the ground that rabbits can feed on, appear under these power lines. A large landowner in my state was very reluctant to grant permission for hunters to hunt his land. However, when I explained that all I wanted to hunt was the power line right-of-ways, I was granted permission and had some superb rabbit hunting all season long. Because right-of-ways are often planted with grasses to keep down the growth of weeds, they provide abundant habitat and food for the rabbit. In many states, power line right-of-ways are planted as green fields for deer. In some states, these right-of-ways are permitted to grow up with briars and brambles. But in most states, power line right-of-ways provide hot spots for bunnies and the hunters who know how to hunt under the high-voltage lines.

TOMORROW: USE HOT-WEATHER HUNTING TACTICS AND HUNT HIGH SPOTS AND PROTECTED PLACES DURING FLOODS