HKB
increased. As soon as we detected the trick, we were careful to let the coloured rabbits go free. We found that it was altogether to our interest to preserve them.
During night poaching for rabbits and hares the ground game is driven from its feeding ground to the woods or copses. Precisely the reverse method is employed during the day when the game is in cover. The practice is to find a spinny in which both rabbits and hares are known to lie; and then to set purse nets on the outside of every opening which may possibly be used by the frightened animals. The smaller the wood or patch of cover the easier it is to work. A man, with or without a dog, enters the covert, and his presence soon induces the furry denizens to bolt. As these rush through their customary runs they find themselves in the meshes of a net, and every struggle only makes them faster. This method has the disadvantage of being done in the light, but where there is much game is very deadly.
Snares for hares and rabbits are not used nearly so much now as formerly. For all that, they are useful in outlying districts, or on land that is not closely watched. For hares the snare is a wire noose tied to a stick with string, and placed edgeways in the trod. To have the snare the right height is an important matter; and it will be found that two fists high for a hare, and one for a rabbit, is the most deadly. Casuals set their snares in hedge-bottoms, but these are no good. Two or three feet away from the hedge is the most killing position--for this reason: when a hare canters up to a fence it never immediately bounds through; it pauses about a yard away, then leaps into the hedge-bottom. It is during this last leap that it puts its neck into the noose and is taken. If a keeper merely watches a snare until it is "lifted," good and well; but to put a hare or rabbit into it and then pounce on the moucher--well, that is a different matter. It is not difficult to see where a hare has been taken, especially if the run in which the snare was set was damp. There will be the hole where the peg has been, and the ground will be beaten flat by the struggles of the animal in endeavouring to free itself.
Field-netting for rabbits may be prevented in the same way as for partridges--by thorning the ground where the game feeds. It is quite a mistake to plant thorns, or even to stake out large branches. The only ones that at all trouble the poacher are small thorns which are left absolutely free on the ground. These get into the net, roll it up hopelessly in a short time, and if this once occurs everything escapes. Large thorns are easily seen and easily removed, but the abominable ones are the small ones left loose on the surface of the ground.
The most certain and wholesale method of rabbit poaching I ever practised was also the most daring. The engine employed was the "well-trap." This is a square, deep box, built into the ground, and immediately opposite to a smoot-hole in the fence through which the rabbits run from wood or covert to field or pasture. Through a hole in the wall or fence a wooden trough or box is inserted. As the rabbits run through, the floor opens beneath their weight, and they drop into the "well." Immediately the pressure is removed the floor springs back to its original position, and thus a score or more rabbits are often taken in a single night. In the construction of these "well-traps," rough and unbarked wood is used, though, even after this precaution, the rabbits will not take them for weeks. Then, they become familiar; the weather washes away all scent, and the "well" is a wholesale engine of destruction. All surface traces of the existence of the trap must be covered over with dead leaves and woodland debris. The rabbits, of course, are taken alive, and the best way of killing them is by stretching them across the knee, and so dislocating the spine. If the keeper once finds out the trap the game is up. Whilst it lasts, however, it kills more rabbits than every other stroke of woodcraft the poacher knows.