Mystery solved

Well here is the answer to my mystery of Friday. I was pretty sure that a Bob Cat was responsible for the Jack Rabbit in the hot wire. However I didn't think that he would be back for a week or so. Especially after he got his nose burned with the wire.

It snowed a bit this evening. I had turned to dogs out to pee around 9 PM, and Josie ran out the door and as soon as she hit the yard she started barking as though she had seen something close. I got the spot light thinking that I would be seeing Deer, but there was nothing. I later found this cats tracks right outside the door. I think Josie almost ran right into him.

Karen and I settled down to watch the final day of the NFR. For some reason I decided to see if the Deer had come up to the stack. I went to the back bedroom and tried to shine the light on the hay. The reflection of the windows made it tough to see clearly, but I finally saw an animal on the top of the Alfalfa bale. It looked like a Cat, but I couldn't tell for sure. I got Karen and my rifle. We went outside and I had her shine the light on the hay stack. It didn't take long to decide that this was not one of our outside Kittys.

It appears to me that he caught another Rabbit as it went up to eat some of the Alfalfa. There was hair and a bit of blood under the hot wire, as well as "scuffle" marks.
However I couldn't see any indication that he was able to keep or eat the rabbit.

The picture above shows where the cat had lain long enough to melt the snow. I think he grabbed a Rabbit and got into the hot wire again, only this time he ended up inside the enclosure. I also think that every time he tried to get out, he got zapped. Either that or he decided to get comfortable while he was waiting for a Rabbit to come into range.

They are lovely creatures, but they don't belong in my yard. We have been pretty lucky in that we have only lost some Pigeons to them. It could have been a lot worse.

He is actually pretty heavy. Karen was trying to take a picture of him out by the hay stack. Of course she couldn't see through the view finder, and I am trying to hold him up long enough for the camera to focus, I am starting to grunt by the time the picture finally snapped.

Daylight has come, so I went out to work out the way that events unfolded prior to my interruption.


Here is where the Cat caught the Jack Rabbit.

He killed it, and then brought it under the wire, coming towards the bottom of the picture. You can see some blood spots just under the wire.

He brought it around the loading chute and ate it at the beginning of the chute.

After he finished, he buried the guts and a few other remains behind the wall.

The part that I find interesting is that after killing and eating one Jack, He walked back through the hot wire to take a nap on the hay stack, perhaps waiting for desert? Who knows? I am surprised at how brazen these cats are.

I did not blog about it, but this is the second encounter with Bob Cats this fall. I first noticed that we had a Cat working the house in June. I kept finding the tracks around the house, and other than some spots of Rabbit hair left from one of her kills. Some in the shadow of the house itself. Then we started finding some of our Pigeons in the kill spots. Then finally as we were sitting in the house, me reading, and Karen on the computer, one of the house cats sitting in the window. A loud thump against the glass brought me and a spot light outside to see what was going on. I found a large Bob Cat standing under the window, looking at me from about 8 feet away. I called Karen to come see, and the Cat moved back to about 12 feet and was standing there watching us. Of course by that time I could see that this wasn't going to turn out very well for us and our critters.

This one was a female. I had a hard time believing that she would try to kill our house Cat while we were right there. The TV was on, but she ignored all that and the Dogs on their trips outside. We will see if things will calm down a bit now, and since Jessie is fat, and the Harris Hawks will not hunt in the snow, I guess I will take a couple of sleeping pills ( Betsy and Frank ) and wait for better weather.

Jessie's turn

The weather is getting down there and the wind is whipping. Jessie however wanted to fly, and was at her perfect weight of 870 grams. She was begging me from the time that I put her out this morning, to go hunting. Finally at 1:30 PM I decided that I was going to have to keep my word and take her out to see what we could do.

Tami was in the middle of shipping Cows, so it was just Karen and the dogs. We drove up as close as we could get, and I decided to see if I could locate a bunch of Ducks in the hope that we could bracket them and get a good flush for a change. I walked down to the Creek and found what I thought might be a few Ducks floating on one of the curves of the Creek. I went back to the truck and as I did, the Duck that I saw, got up and flew up the ditch a ways. I decided that we would just turn Jessie loose and let her figure out where the Ducks were.

I turned her loose and she settled on an area of the creek that was about a hundred yards or more up the creek from the spot that I had intended to rush. She did not leave that area, so Karen and I started up the ditch to get in position to rush the area that she was circling over. I finally left Karen at the lower end of her circles, and I went about 50 yards further up the Creek. As I was hurrying up the creek, I noticed that Betsy had gone on point towards the Creek. I knew then that she was smelling the Ducks. This is the first time that I could say that she was actually pointing  Ducks. I decided that she had a much better chance to know where they were than I, so I praised her and told her to find them. She moved closer to the creek and actually a bit behind where I had intended to hit the creek.  I told her to get them up. She flash pointed again, so I pushed her to flush. She hit the ditch right in the middle of a large bunch of Mallards and got them off the water.

Jessie flashed down from my left and leveled out to slash through the flock. I could not see what happened as she was lower than the bushes that I was trying to see through. She never came up, so I assumed that she had caught one, but the question was where, since the creek curled around again, leaving a small point to my right.

When I got around the point that I was on, I could see her fighting a Duck on the next little point. The dogs and I jumped into the Creek and started wading across. Josie had some trouble getting out of the water, so I gave her a boost and scrambled up the bank myself to go help Jessie.  The point was only about 10 feet wide, and they had fought almost all the was across it. Only the fact that Jessie had both a piece of Greasewood and the Ducks neck in one of her feet, Kept them from rolling into the water.

I helped her kill the Drake, patted and praised the dogs for their exceptional help, and settled back to wait for her to get around all the Duck that she could manage. Karen and Betsy went back to the truck to get out of the wind, leaving Josie, Jess and I out in the wind. This Duck is still one of the locals. There was little fat on the Duck, so I knew that it had not come down through the Corn fields of the North. Jessie peeled all the fat that she could get off it, only eating the meat to get to the fat.

 It is a bit surprising to see dogs that have to be forced into a warm swimming pool, willingly jump into this cold creek and swim across without a thought.

It was very nice to actually catch something again. It is tough to do on a regular basis on ditches and Creeks. No matter that the Dogs and I hit the Ducks head on, they still flew right up the Creek. If she had slashed the Duck instead of just grabbing it, we would have gone home empty handed again. If she had not grabbed some Greasewood inadvertently, she would have lost it in the Creek again.

It is true that Jessie is a bit of a handful, but it is also true that she is a bird of a lifetime. They do not come with this much drive and desire very often. I do not know if I will ever again have a Falcon with  half of the ability that this girl has. It is time to give her a chance however.

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.