Hunters who have access to enough land for rabbit hunting could just let their dogs go and see what they jump, or they could do like Smith and focus on areas that show promising sign.
“We probably covered about a 30-acre section of woods here today,” Brent Smith said at the end of our rabbit hunt. “And as we’re going through the woods, we’re constantly looking for rabbit sign because rabbits tend to bunch up together in the woods. They don’t necessarily stay right there side by side in the beds together, but they kind of congregate together.”
As he moves through the woods, Smith looks for sign like where rabbits have been chewing on certain kinds of bushes during the wintertime when the grass has died or gone dormant.
Anybody who has ever planted trees in an area with lots of rabbits knows exactly what Smith is talking about. Rabbits chew on the bark of trees to get the nutrients out of it, and if they chew enough of it they can actually girdle a tree by cutting through the bark all the way around the trunk, which will kill the tree.
“Also on stumps you look for rabbit pellets to get an idea of how many rabbits are in the area,” Smith said. “If we start seeing areas in the woods where you got a lot of gnawing on the bushes and a lot of droppings, that’s the area we’re more apt to drop the dogs.”
