WORKING: A bad days ferreting.

A usual winters Sunday morning for me is loading the Land rover at around 5.30 am, for my regular rabbiting trip. I alternate my weeks between 4 different farms and know the areas quite well.

I prefer to use jills for working and took my regulars Orla, Sugar, Spice and Star.
The majority of the burrows on this particular farm are in the hedgerows with just a couple out in the open fields with a good population of rabbits, I have worked this area before and I always use 15-foot locators, as some of the burrows do tend to be quite deep.

As my morning progressed I had caught 7 rabbits and had just moved on to a nice 5 hole burrow in a hedge bottom, I dropped the nets on and placed Spice into one of the holes, within seconds there was a rabbit in the net, and the ferret right behind, she quickly turned back down the hole, indicating to me she was on to another rabbit. From where I was standing I could feel the bumping underground, it stopped and then resumed again, I quickly got my locator ready and as soon as the bumping stopped again I was able to pinpoint exactly where my ferret was. She was about 8ft across from the hedge bottom into the field, and about 2ft deep, this was what I thought would be an easy dig. The first12 inches were, but then I hit brickends, wood, glass, metal and coke.

After about half an hour I eventually broke into the burrow, I then retrieved and dispatched the rabbit from under an iron bar and my ferret followed on through. I noticed she had blood on her face which I assumed was off the rabbit but on closer inspection she had quite a deep gash from below her eye to the tip of her nose. This cut my rabbiting day short and I returned home with just 9 rabbits.

My first job was to clean up the wound, which I did with some saline solution, I couldn’t see anything in the wound, but to be safe I would take her along to the vets the following day to be checked out. After an injection and 8 days of antibiotics the wound had healed 100% and she resumed her rabbiting 3 weeks later.

Copyright © 2004 Bob Bradury