Foxglove

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, 17:35 BST
Updated 8th Jun 2018, 04:31 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.

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.

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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.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette January 14

Related topics:West Sussex Gazette