On Sunday morning, the 4th Jan, I and a couple of my friends met at a
farm in Airedale, North Yorkshire to do some pest control for the land
owner.  I had four albino jills with me Arwen and Flower as one team,
and Teal and Kira as the reserve - these two didn't actually get to do
any hunting, plus I had my lurchers Spock and Lucy.  Andy had brought
two of his poley jills, Bandito and Jilly.  Kaye just had her two young
lurchers, Todd and Erin.  They were just along to see what they thought
about rabbits, neither lurcher had ever seen a rabbit.
 
I kitted Arwen and Flower out with locator collars and we crossed the
road into the field where we would be working.  The first stop was a bury
that was fairly compact but had lots of holes.  Andy set about netting up
some of the holes that I thought was a bit of waste of time as we just
didn't have enough nets to do the lot.  Anyway just to show willing I
netted up about half-a-dozen.  I wasn't too hopeful about there being any
rabbits around as I'd been told that some had been seen with myxy :-(
Andy had checked out round the bury and had said that the dropping were
from the previous night.  All four jills went into the bury... and after
about several minutes we heard some thumping below ground.  The jills
kept popping out of various holes and disappearing back underground.
 
Erin, Kaye's young lurcher bitch was lying down in the field a hundred
yards or so from where we were working.  Kaye hadn't sent her there - so
we all agreed that she had placed herself in a good position in case any
rabbits bolted towards her.  Kaye was holding Todd as all he wanted to do
was play... he hadn't a clue what was happening.  My two, old hands at
the game, were keeping an eye on what was happening, we could more or
less tell from watching them where the action was.  A rabbit suddenly
shot out of a hole made a dash towards the hedge, Andy saw it go along
the hedgerow and then it cut across the field where Erin spotted it.
She gave chase, Kaye released Todd who promptly went the wrong way -
he hadn't seen the rabbit at all.  My two eventually realised which
direction the rabbit had gone and set off.
 
Meanwhile Todd accidentally tripped over a rabbit that was lying in a
scrape in the field and all four lurchers had a good game of chase before
the rabbit dived underground.
 
We moved on to a one holer down in the bottom boundary fence and bank of
the field, I only took Arwen with me and a net as I didn't reckon on
being all that long down there as rabbits were generally pretty quick to
bolt from it.  I set the net and let Arwen wander down.  Within minutes
we heard a rabbit squeal and then we waited to see if it was going to run
for it.  I got the ferret locator into play and found that Arwen was just
over a foot down and 4 feet from the entrance.  She was remaining in one
place so I reckoned that she'd killed down and the only way we were going
to get the rabbit was with a bit of digging.  I very carefully pin
pointed the exact position that Arwen was in and set to work with the
spade.  I kept checking how far she was down every couple of spadefuls of
dirt as you have to take it very careful as you near the ferret.  I was
only inches away from breaking through when Arwen came out of the bury.
Andy picked her up and commented that she had a bloody nose and was
licking her lips.  Andy then took over the digging and soon broke through
into the tube and removed the rabbit - a nice young buck.
 
I put Flower into the bury to check if there were any more rabbits at
home but she came out pretty quickly so we moved on up the boundary to
the next bury that Lucy was very interested in.
 
--
Sheila
Bolton Ferret Welfare - not a registered charity
 
Declaration Day Quote of the day from Vini Faal, "Alun Michael is
to animal welfare what King Herod was to baby sitting".
 
Web Site: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ferreter/bolton.htm
last update 5 Dec 2002
NFWS web site http://www.nfws.net updated 15th October 2003
[Posted in FML issue 4385]