A new mystery, and catch up

Hunting has been pretty "hit and miss' lately. Mostly miss. The weather and busy hunting partners have combined to make things a bit uneventful. Of course  my own attitudes and laziness have played a large part as well.

I have been having some problems with the available rabbit populations, and a lot of our "non events" are due to not finding much to hunt. I made a 100 mile round trip Thursday to hunt one of my last years spots, only to arrive to a snow covered hunting area. As is usual, the Harris' did not perform well in that type of cover. I was also hunting by myself, and neither of the birds likes to share a Tee perch. So one rode and the other was always in the wrong place, so I got some exercise but nothing else to show for it. Karen was off with her gambling buddy and Tami was off to the Dentist.

As for Jessie, the game situation has been the same. For what ever reason the migration either has bypassed us so far, or not gotten really started. All of the storms have been from the South, with the jet stream going up through this area and coming down in the area of the central flyway. There are a few Mallards on the Creek, but that has been a bust so far. They always fly up and down the creek, and the twists and turns of Crooked Creek offer way too many ways to escape. Tami, Grace and I took her to the lake just before dark Wed. and she knocked a Mallard hen into the ground, but it managed to claw its way back into the water before she could get to it.

I have decided to put Jessie in a breeding project this winter. A friend has a Male Peregrine that is supposed to be a "natural" breeder. The hard part in breeding Falcons is to find a male that will copulate. Their problem is that they are much smaller than the female, and their sex drive is much less than their caution. Jessie has always been driven to nest. Her third year she got started laying eggs and didn't quit until she had laid 25 eggs. A normal clutch is 3-5. If she actually does make babies, I will leave her in the project and begin the process all over with one of her daughters. If not then I will bring her back home.

This morning when I went to feed, I found a dead Jack rabbit tangled in the hot wire around the hay stack.

At first I thought that it had died of shock. The wire is really hot, but I guess it isn't heart stopping hot, since there are no dead Deer, dogs and cats lying around it. Josie will not go around the Hay after sniffing the wire. Tiger, the cat will not get close to it either. In fact he was hiding under the car yowling this morning until I shut the fence off and it quit snapping on the dead rabbit.

Then I see a patch of hair about 8 feet in front the the wire where the rabbit was caught. The Jack had the wire wrapped around his hind leg and the wire was through its toes, so it was stuck, hard enough that it took two hands to unravel it.

 There was a scrape on one hind leg, and other than that just a puncture wound in one ear.

I skinned the Rabbit to see if I could find the cause of death.

As you can see the only signs of trauma on the body is a severed neck.

 I just checked the hide and the only cuts in the skin are puncture wounds, and the only injury is in the neck. So I think that I have another kitty cat hunting here. Not sure how its encounter with the hot wire will affect his willingness to hunt here however. I sure would have liked to have seen the encounter.

Tami and Reuben came over this evening and we went around the house to try to find something to hunt. We managed to find perhaps 6 Jacks, with most of them about 200 yards off on the start. Puddy managed to finally catch one of them on the other side of the fence along the runway. By the time we got through the fence it had managed to break away from her. Yogi was within 15 feet of assisting, but it might as well been a mile. We came away with no game to show for the effort.