Foxglove January 14 2009

A BITTER frost had greeted us on awakening, and our ferreting trip promised to be a chill one. We left the vehicle at the top of the hill and went into the valley on foot, along the lee of the old flint wall and then to the lower meadows where we had seen a lot of rabbit activity.
By The Newsroom
Published 4th Jan 2009, 17:27 BST
Updated 8th Jun 2018, 04:00 BST

All the way along, the buries ran either side of the fence, a formidable fence far too high for a dog to leap, and not suitable for a man to climb. Therefore we would need one of us on either side of it, and the dog to stay on one side only, which stretched our resources considerably.

Also stretched was our combined tally of nets, for these were large buries, deep and old. Would there be rabbits in there? The dog said "yes", looking at us from under her brows with a predator's eyes.

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Having completed the preliminaries of clearing some of the ground, netting the rabbit holes, and putting the tracker collars on the ferrets, we took a side of the fence each, and I being the elder, and slower of movement, took the dog on my side. She is better than another person at this job.

Five ferrets went down at one end of the bury, to work the rabbits towards the best ground for catching, and as my colleague lifted the net for the last ferret to go under, a rabbit shot out of an adjacent hole and nearly hit him. Luckily the net held, though the speed of the bolt pulled the peg out of the ground, for getting pegs well into frosted ground is not easy.

The dog would have pinned the rabbit had she been on that side of the fence: she was visibly annoyed, dancing with impatience, but did not make a sound, for her kind are silent workers. Directly afterwards came a bolt on my side, but two rabbits came out of the hole together.

The first rolled up into the net but the second set off at speed, dog in pursuit. It dived through the fence, leaving her helpless once more, and took a long sprint all the way to the wall. If she had been on the other side, she would probably have caught that. Luckily the next bolt was my side as well, and she pinned the rabbit nicely for me until I could get to it, then left to do the same at the far end of the bury.

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Bolts came in quick succession, and then the ferrets, having done their job, came out of the bury looking for the next project. We picked them up and put them in their carrying boxes while we debated the strategy for the next bury.

The dog would have to stay on my side, for the remains of a broken metal fence protruded from the ground along the other side of the tall fence, and might have caused her injury. So we repeated the procedure, and eight more thickset fat rabbits with wonderful winter coats fell to our nets, the dog holding three of them in textbook fashion, and then catching one as it shook off the net and made a bid for safety.

All this took some considerable time, and we debated whether to start one more bury. There was work to do at home which would be better done in daylight, but the dog was marking staunchly, and this bury was not as large as the others.

It only held two rabbits, but they bolted quickly and we caught them both. Then we knew the time was right to clear up and make our way home, for we would be out here again tomorrow to clear the rest of the fenceline.