T'WAS THE NIGHT AFTER LOCKDOWN

Dave Barham gets back into the field after lockdown eases to discover that his rabbit permission is overrun

- Dave Barham

If you read my piece in the June issue ‘T’was The Night Before Lockdown’ you’ll know that I had a rather successful rabbit shoot at my stables permission, right before we got locked down.

Well, we might have been on lockdown for two months, but the rabbits clearly hadn’t.

The evening after Boris announced the proposed easing of lockdown measures I had a call from the owner of the livery to inform me that the rabbit population had exploded.

CONSTANT CONTROL

I’ve written about this perm a few times, and it’s one that has consistently produced rabbits for my shooting buddy, Roger, and I. We tend to start there in the spring and take 20 or 30 off the land, then give it a month and return in the early summer for a week or more, by which time the rabbits have often repopulated the area. I think a lot of the time they move in from other fields, because the entire place is surrounded by miles of farmland.

We continue this consistent ‘week on, month off’ throughout the year until winter, just to keep on top of them. Neither Roger or I are registered pest controllers, we do it as a favour because Roger’s wife knows the owner, but because we couldn’t get out it seemed as though the rabbits had been having a ‘field day’.

LETTER OF PERMISSION

Although lockdown had been eased, I thought it best to acquire a letter of permission from Laura, the owner of the livery, just in case I got stopped by the police.

The letter read:
‘Dear Mr Barham,