Another shopping trip for Hawk Food.

Winter is coming right along. We have had another snow that covers the ground a bit, and this morning the snow was sparkling with diamonds. You should know that snow on the ground here is a bit unusual for this area. We do get snow, but it soon melts off. The "big die off" of three years ago was due to a snowfall of about 18 inches that turned into ice, and would not go away. That began the eradication of all the Rabbits, Antelope and Deer in this area. There were too many Rabbits and they would have died of disease the next summer if they hadn't froze to death because of the icy snow and starvation. I suppose that the nature of the Sage limits the food available to this type of wildlife, and snow covering and blocking it are just too much for the Rabbits. Then minus temps and the wind chill that comes with it are just too much.

When I moved here one of the locals saw the snow plow for my quad and asked "what are you going to do with that"? He told me at the time that the snow rarely lasts for more than a week, and for the most part that seems to be the reality. The snow and ice of three years ago was definitely unusual.

Connie came down Monday to spend some time with me. She likes to shoot and is always after me in the summer to go shoot some of the Ground Squirrels that infest the hay fields of Burns. So when the snow again covered the ground I knew that my friend on the White horse road was going to have the Jacks working on his hay stacks again. So I made arrangements to go back there again for another shopping trip.

Without getting too deep into the subject, this seems to be a bit of a contradiction of my philosophical beliefs. In a nutshell I am a true conservationist, in that I try really hard to leave enough of the game population so that there is enough breeding population left to keep the next years offspring high enough that there is no reduction in numbers. Nothing noble about it at all. I do have "principals" that I live by in falconry- I want the hunt to be fair, and I do not require a large head count to feel successful.

So basically this type of hunting for me is not sport, it is "shopping". The ranchers normally shoot the rabbits with shotguns and toss them in the Sage for the Coyotes. They need to protect their hay stacks from the Jacks that come from miles around to feast on the hay. They can topple the stacks from their undermining of the bottoms if the numbers are high enough. You have no idea as to how many Jacks converge on some of the stack yards. There are paths in the snow that are beaten down that are amazing, and they are everywhere and coming from all directions. I read earlier that Jacks will travel up to 10 miles for food or water.

The snow has caused the Antelope to gather up as well, and we saw one group of Antelope that had to have more than 150 in it, along the Hwy as we went south. The feral Horses were also gathered close to the White Horse Road as well.

This ranch is one of the few places that I rarely hunt with the Hawks, simply because there are not enough rabbits that stay in the area during the daylight hours to make it worth while. It is also 15 miles of gravel road to get there. With snow on the ground its a bit like it was here, when I brought in some bales of Alfalfa to feed our horses. I had 30 deer camp on this spot and it just drove me crazy trying to keep them off of it.

The temperatures was in the mid teens as we took up our vigil in the stack yard. Connie was sitting in the back seat to watch to the right of the yard while I took the left. We of course had to leave the car windows down. I gave her my 17 cal rifle while I used my 22 rimfire. Nothing but head shots.  As it got darker the rabbits began coming so fast that it was sometimes difficult to keep up. The darker it got the more came. I picked off a group of four that came on my side by shooting the farthermost one and then forward till there were none left standing. It was so cold that both of us had trouble reloading because our fingers were so numb. We managed 18 before it go too dark to shoot.

On our way back home with our loot, we saw a pair of eyes coming our way down the road. I stopped the car and eventually realized that what we were seeing was a Kit Fox.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_fox

He ran right at the car and didn't turn till he was just 10 feet in front of us. I knew that these little Foxes lived here, but they are endangered and very scarce. I was amazed at how small he was, Tiger, my cat, is bigger than he is by a lot. We were both more than a bit amazed by this apparition, and we were talking about it as we continued our drive. After a bit a truck passed us going the other way, which was unusual as well. Not a lot of traffic on this dirt road, especially at night. As we got within a couple of miles of Hwy 95 we again saw something in the road. The other truck had apparently hit a wandering Jack Rabbit in the road, and there was another Kit Fox feeding on it. Needless to say I left this Rabbit for the Fox.

It was quite a night. Not only do I have a "lady Friend" that isn't afraid to get a little blood on her hands, she is a damn good shot as well.