Hunting by Moonlight

I decided to give Jessie another chance to see if she is ready to hunt yesterday. So late in the afternoon I took her over to the ranch and stole Tami away from her Chicken cleaning to go with me. Yesterday was butchering day for both of our old Chickens. Some of mine were at least three years old and hadn't laid an egg in months. Tami just got rid of a bunch of her older ones to make room for the new ones coming on. Totally there were 17 Chickens to be cleaned. Reuben came along to help. I was tired enough when we were done that I didn't intend to hunt. After a soak in the hot tub and a serious case of boredom, I changed my mind. Poor Tami still had 6 Chickens left to clean when I got there, but I guess she needed a change of scenery, so she went with me.

I had put Jessie up for a bit and fed her some Pigeons and just let her sit for a week or so, on the off chance that she would want to hunt when and if she got another chance. There were plenty of Ducks at the barn, so we put her in the air, and when she was in position, we flushed them. She goofed around without ever committing while most of them flew. She finally decided that she wanted one of them, but was not able to catch up before he splashed back into the creek. She then flew over to her favorite hay stack and sat down. I had seen this before, so we went back to the shop and watched Dave work on a truck. I was monitoring her whereabouts with the telemetry, and could see where she was sitting, and I knew what she wanted was for me to call her to the lure. We sat there for an hour each determined to get our way, but I had already had my dinner and didn't really care if she came or not. Finally she blinked and flew over to where we were. There had been some Ducks in the creek there, but they had all swam somewhere else, so there was nothing to do but call her down to the lure.

She should have anxious to hunt as her weight was about three ounces lower than what I hunted her last year. Well I guess we will have to step it up a notch. She got some rabbit on the lure and half of a Starling for her dinner.

Today was the Harris' day, and I waited quite late to pick up the girls hoping that the wind would moderate a bit. At 6 PM I decided that I couldn't wait any longer and started picking up the girls. Jessie wanted to go, even trying to fly to me while I was holding Yogi. Sorry Pal, not today, and maybe not tomorrow either.

I decided that we would hunt the field that had the dead rabbits in it, and I would check the ones that we caught to see if I could find anything wrong with the ones that they caught. If there is anything wrong with them the Liver will generally show abnormalities.

Unfortunately by the time we got out in the field the Moon was already coming up over the hills to the East.

  Oh well, Harris' don't sweat the small stuff. They will hunt by flashlight if they have to. We jumped one not far into the field and he sure didn't run like he felt bad. He turned the girls every which way but loose, leaving them sitting on the ground wondering which way he went. We went a bit further and the next one also gave them the slip after several repeated attempts to bring him to bag. Strangely enough I was elated. One of the symptoms of Tularemia is sluggishness. These guy's were not sluggish at all. Finally the next one made an error, and Puddy slammed into him, with Yogi soon making the anchoring shot to his head.

If you look closely at this picture you will see that Puddy has him by only his foot, and that there is a big wad of Jack Rabbit butt fur including the tail off to the left of the bush. His butt was ripped to shreds, but he would have escaped if not for Yogi.

I tossed them each a chunk of the last rabbit that they had caught while Tami went to examine the rabbit.  He was not a youngster by any stretch, and was carrying a substantial amount of fat, and his liver was nice and normal, which pleased me enormously.

 We hunted for a bit more, but it was getting really dark, so after a couple more chases we called them back and tossed the rest of their meal on the ground for them to eat. By the time we got to the car it was fully dark.