Hunting swamp ghosts

This beagle just retrieved a snowshoe hare for the hunter.

Hunting snowshoe hares is a hoot. What's not to like about it?

Well, we get to stand in thick cedars, Christmas tree plantations, juniper thickets or pines, and try to guess when and where the satchel-footed ghost hare will appear next.

All we need is some snow, We got another seven or eight inches of snow between yesterday afternoon and last night. We have more than enough snow for hunting the white hares. Sometimes, as has been true for several years, hares are conspicuous by their absense. They can be hard to find.

We can have snow fall off tree boughs and find its way down our neck, and when the snow gets deep, we get to wander around in this heavy cover and hope we don't fall down. Going down is easy, but climbing back to a vertical position can be difficult in deep powdery snow.

Hares are no longer plentiful in the northern Lower Peninsula.

There is the added bonus of listening to a some deep-throated beagles in full cry as they weave their way through heavy cover. Sometimes the hounds are sight trailing the swamp ghost, but most often the dogs are 100 yards or farther behind the hare.

Mind you, I've stalked snowshoe hared and run them with hounds, and there is one major requirement. I've even hunted them with a bow. All one needs a fresh hare track to follow.

Those tracks seem to be getting far less common in many areas. Twenty to 25 years ago, all we had to do was look for the thickest cover in northern counties and there would be tracks everywhere.

That's not so anymore. Some of my buddies have gone looking for hare tracks in all the right places, and if they find tracks, most of them are cottontails. It's a proven fact that cottontails are moving farther north every year.

We can blame the hare scarcity on new housing developments. We can blame it on clearing some land and planting bushes and shrubs around our house. There is predation by bobcats, coyotes, fox, hawks, and owls. People and our inroads into what once was ideal hare habitat must assume some blame, and the other cause is snowies are cyclic by nature.

Folks, if snowshoe hares are cyclic, then their cycle is close to hitting rock bottom, especially in the northern Lower Peninsula. There are still more hares in the U.P., but their numbers are slowly dropping as well.

Hares are cyclic, and heavily preyed upon by avian and land predators.

Yeah, I know,air and land predators take some of the the white animals but there is nothing sportsmen can do about that. The Fish & Wildlife Service has protected birds of prey for many years, and those who kill one of these birds and get caught, are severely punished.

So, what's a hare hunter to do? Well, they can easily find cottontail rabbits in most Lower Peninsula areas. Or ... they can do as some guys I know do.

They go hunting snowshoe hares. They scout for habitat that still holds some hares and go hunting. Unlike conventional wisdom dictates, they either go for the enjoyment of listening to hound music and leave the firearms home or they forget to load the shotgun.

They give the running hares a free pass. They give the dogs a good workout as the hare runs an egg-shaped oval before returning to the area where he was initially jumped. The hunters may let the white hare make two or three circles, catch up the hounds, and head for another location.

This way they have the thrill of listening to bawls, bellers, chattering, chops, howls, yelps and other words used to describe the voice of each individual hound.

Hunt the hares but limit the kill to keep hound interest high.

You see, hunting snowshoe hares is a good bit like hunting spring wild turkeys. The kill of a gobbler or a hare is anticlimactic. It's the sounds of the hunt, the dogs trailing the scent in full cry or the gobbler roaring back at the hen-talking hunter. Seeing the hare or a turkey is a major part of the hunt, and since hares are getting to the point of low numbers, taking the pooch out for a run may have to be enough fun.

Sure, the hound owner wants to kill the occasional hare to keep his dogs interest at a high level, but it doesn't have to happen on every hunt. If turkey hunters killed every turkey they saw, there soon wouldn't be any gobblers left to hunt or the birds would stop coming to the call.

It's much the same way with snowshoe hares. Maybe we'll just have to be content to listen to hound music. On many days, standing knee-deep in snow in a cedar swamp and drinking in the sounds of hounds on a hot track, has to be good enough.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors

Forget the deer: let’s find some bunny habitat

Two or three snowshoe hares used to be common but no longer.

It's almost Christmas, and my back deck has already been shoveled a dozen times. That's right, that often so far this weekand it’s coming down hard as this is being written.

Folks, if you want snow to slide off your metal roof and save you a laborious back-breaking job, get a day of 35 degree temperatures and combine that with 20+ inches of wet snow on the roof, and shoveling becomes more than an ordeal; it can become an adventure in knowing when to duck your head and body under the eaves.

Ice sometimes forms under the snow pack, and as everything begins to warm and wet snow falls on the present load, things begin to happen. Gravity exerts its inevitable force on the snow, and it slowly begins to move.

Snow always moves downhill slowly, and then builds quickly into an avalanche.

Snow doesn't move up-hill. It comes down, and quite rapidly at times and with very little warning.

There is little time to think about falling snow coming off the roof, but know this: the one place you do not want to be is under the snow and ice once it begins plummeting toward the deck. The force of the impact literally shakes the house.

The avalanche begins with a faint creak or two as the metal roof flexes a bit under the strain, and next is a barely audible hiss. If you hear the hiss, you best be ducking for cover fast because the snow will come crashing down in one or two seconds. That's all the warning you get, trust me.

There is very little warning with snow on a metal roof. Creak, creak, hiss and here it comes. If you snooze, you lose this one-sided race. If you get hit by a 50-pound jagged piece of ice on the old noggin, your shoveling days may be over.

Seriously, this year's early snowfall has put a snuffer on my local deer hunting. I shovel every day that it snows, and since my measuring device is attached to my house, I can tell how much snow we get.

We are at between 45 and 50 inches of snow so far.

Mind you, it may not be exactly accurate because some of it may be drifted snow, but I use my back deck railing as a guide. Each morning I look at the railing, and if there is a noticeable amount of white stuff, I measure it before starting to shovel it off.

Since mid- to late-November, we have got 46 inches of snow. I don't care if it all falls straight down out of the sky or blows in sideways, what is on the railing is counted daily in inches. I usually keep close track until we exceed 100 inches of snow and to continue counting is a waste of my time.

One hundred inches of snow is too much of a good thing. By the way we are going, unless the snow slows down, we may be close to that rediculous number before we usher in Christmas.

It's almost too much now right now to easily get around. Me and deep snow, make for a major problem for someone with poor vision.

It has a tendency to cover fallen logs, brushpiles, stumps and other things that continually jump out in front of me, and I manage to entangle my feet in them before falling to the ground in a might splash of snow.

That’s why I love to hunt snowshoe hares. I let hounds circle bunnies to me.

It's one reason why I used to hunt snowshoe hares as often as possible. You'd walk in the cedars, find a single track, sic the beagles on the track, and wait around for the short-legged hounds to circle the hare within shotgun range.

Well, I don't know about you, but the last 10 years has been tough on snowies. They seem to be disappearing rapidly, and finding a spot where it sometimes is possible to shoot one of the ghost hares, has become almost as difficult as walking easily in 30 inches of snow.

All of my old hare hotspots have cooled off, and we're lucky to find one or two hares each winter. In some cases, we head into the cedar swamps without a firearm. We'll let the dogs run the occasional bunny, but shooting the hare is almost a criminal act.

And that, my friends, is a rather sobering thought as hare numbers continue to spiral downwards.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors