Shooting rabbits wouldn't occur to you at first as one of the most difficult of gun sports. But, according to Richard Jefferies, the great writer on natural history, "Rabbits, although of `low degree' in comparison with the pheasant, really form an important item in the list of the [game]keeper's charges. Shooting generally commences with picking out the young rabbits about the middle or towards the end of the hay harvest . . . It requires experience and skill to select the young rabbit just fit for the table from the old bucks, the does which may yet bring forth another litter, and those little bunnies that do not exceed the size of rats." Further on in this book (The Gamekeeper at Home, 1878) he writes that it is difficult to judge at 30 yards when only the ears appear over the long grass. But while one pair of ears may look very like another, the developed ear is less pointed than the other. This book came to mind on reading another engaging piece in Country Life by Richard Plantaganet, who says he has always seen himself as a rough shooter, and details what comes to his gun within his own few acres and beyond. As to rabbits: "In one corner of my garden I grow vegetables which I share with several thousand rabbits. They eat my sprouts and I eat them in return, which seems a reasonable exchange to me". Hare and pheasant come into the garden, but he rarely shoots hare (decent man); a cock pheasant striding through the cabbages is fair game.
He has also shot "particularly stupid mallards", the stupidity lying in the fact that they have flown in to visit our man's tame ducks and stayed, rather than making off to safety. More falls to his gun. For pigeons roost in the trees around a ruined hay barn and come down to forage any spilled corn the chickens miss. "Occasionally they invite their wild cousins in for a beano, and I can top up the deep freeze."
He says that over a year he must walk hundreds of miles with a gun. He sees himself as "a rough shooter . . . a practical, unpretentious breed, spiritual descendants of the old journeymen gunners, skilled artisans who go out into the fields seeking our suppers rather than waiting for them to be handed to us on a plate".
Query: does anyone agree that rabbits today, perhaps as a result of the myxo war, are much smaller than before? Certainly in one patch of Meath, this is noticeable.