The Vanishing Legacy of Southern Rabbit Hunters

Daniel Williams sits on the tailgate of his Chevrolet Silverado and leans in opposition to an empty canine field exterior his cellular dwelling in Greensboro, Alabama. “I’ve been fascinated about getting me some extra canines,” the 67-year-old says. “However I don’t wish to till I’ve obtained a spot to hunt.” For now, a minimum of, the field and the canine pen behind his dwelling stay empty. It’s approach too costly to maintain a pack of beagles and shoulder all the needed bills — meals, veterinary care — if he can’t hunt them frequently.

Williams isn’t alone. From 1963 to 1967, the primary years for which Alabama has information, a mean of greater than 113,000 hunters harvested greater than 1 million rabbits a 12 months. By 2015, solely 15,000 hunters pushed the briar patches and harvested fewer than 100,000 rabbits. Mississippi has seen related precipitous drops, though the typical harvest per hunter has remained pretty fixed. Judging by these numbers, it’s clear {that a} type of looking is in peril of disappearing. Most of the males who nonetheless protect these traditions are getting old and scuffling with altering habitat, land use, and looking practices.

Certainly, the habitat has modified. The identical elements that led to the digital disappearance of untamed bobwhite quail have harm rabbit numbers as properly, significantly the small japanese cottontails that thrived in upland farm nation. Nonetheless, in some areas, rabbit populations stay wholesome, so recreation shortage does little to clarify the decline within the variety of rabbit hunters.

The rationale for that dramatic shift extra seemingly lies within the enhance within the variety of deer hunters that those self same state surveys reveal. Within the early Sixties, deer had but to unfold utterly all through Alabama. Now, with the state’s deer inhabitants at a strong 1.6 million whitetails, nearly all people has an opportunity to hunt deer, and the seasons run from mid-October till early February.

It wasn’t all the time that approach, Williams recollects. On the sting of Greensboro is the “Thigpen place,” the place Williams’ uncle, Robert Potts, lived and labored, tending beef cattle, milking dairy cows, and plowing fields, amongst assorted different duties. Not a straightforward life, nevertheless it had its perks.

On chilly Saturdays within the fall and winter, Potts and 7 or eight buddies and family members, together with a younger Daniel, would collect on the Thigpen place and hunt all day behind huge black and tan canines — not beagles — with names like Monk, Jack, Brownie, and Black Lady.

“I used to be so little, my uncle wouldn’t let me carry a shotgun,” Williams says. “We put the rabbits in a croaker sack. He let me carry the croaker sack.”
When Williams was lastly sufficiently old to shoot, Potts gave him a beat-up outdated 12-gauge single shot. He nonetheless has it, with its cracks within the inventory, mismatched screws within the set off guard, and a floor so pitted the make and mannequin have lengthy been obscured.

“I nonetheless bear in mind once I killed my first rabbit with it.” Williams says as he cradles the gun. “My uncle died when he was 96 years outdated, in order that gun should be greater than 100 years outdated. However it’ll nonetheless shoot these trendy, high-powered shells.”

Williams relegated that gun to a closet way back in favor of an outdated Sears & Roebuck pump with a Polychoke and a hand-carved inventory. He had the run of the farm, which Williams guesses was about 1,000 acres. And it wasn’t simply there both.

Custom in Transition

In the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rabbit looking was nearly the only province of black hunters within the Deep South’s plantation areas just like the Black Belt and the Mississippi Delta. Whereas white hunters made quail king, scoured the hardwood swamps for squirrels, and arranged dove shoots and deer drives, black hunters gathered to chase cottontails.

At press time, in line with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Nationwide Survey of Fishing, Searching and Wildlife-Related Recreation, though the variety of black hunters has elevated over the last 25 years — from an estimated 294,000 to 297,000 — they nonetheless make up solely 3 % of the full looking inhabitants. That’s properly out of proportion to their 13.2 % illustration within the general inhabitants. Within the days of segregation, rabbit looking supplied some frequent floor between the races. Black tenant farm households turned de facto babysitters for the kids of white landowners. With a whole bunch of acres of farmland to entertain their fees, black women and men handed alongside rabbit-hunting abilities to the white children of their care.

“I nonetheless bear in mind the primary rabbit I ever killed,” says T.M. Culpepper, whose household owned land north of Demopolis, Alabama. “A lady who labored on a farm confirmed me easy methods to spot one in its mattress. She mentioned, ‘Search for the attention.’ They’re completely camouflaged, but when what to search for, you possibly can see the attention — and I did. After I was in Alaska, I used what she taught me and I killed lots of snowshoe rabbits up there.”

So long as his uncle labored on the Thigpen place, Daniel Williams and the lads he hunted with had little purpose to go elsewhere.

“There have been so many rabbits there, we didn’t need to go nowhere else,” he says.

However after they did, they not often, if ever, bumped into posted land.

“We went wherever we needed to and no one cared,” Williams says. “It was all white folks’s land. They had been all taken with quail and deer, and we didn’t care nothing about that.”

John L. Williams — who’s a pal of Daniel Williams’ however not associated­ — grew up on a farm in rural Hale County, south of Tuscaloosa. The overgrown fencerows across the corn and cotton fields, and the fallow fields with their blackberry patches, harbored small japanese cottontails. And the close by hardwood swamps had been dwelling to swamp rabbits, or “cane cutters.” John Williams, now “close to ’bout 90 years outdated,” might stroll out of his household’s dwelling and start looking on the fringe of the yard.

“I’ve rabbit hunted all of my life,” John Williams says as he walks slowly towards his canine pen within the suburban space just under Tuscaloosa the place he now lives. “I really like to listen to the canines run. I might hunt all day.”

Like Daniel Williams, John can bear in mind going looking and not using a gun. He was too poor to personal one as a youth, however he wasn’t content material simply to hold a burlap sack crammed with different hunters’ rabbits. He discovered an appropriate stick, slipped an outdated lug nut off of a tractor wheel over it, and normal a “faucet stick.” It labored so much like a one-way boomerang. With one finish weighted, it spun and swept a broad path. As soon as the canines jumped a rabbit, he knew from listening to the place the race had began the place the rabbit was prone to emerge into the open. He took his place at a strategic location, the place the fence reached a street or on the finish of a cotton discipline, and waited.

“Fairly quickly he’d come out,” John says with a smile. “I might throw that faucet stick and hit him with it. It may not kill him proper off, however it will break him all the way down to the place I might go over and get him.”

It was enjoyable, nevertheless it was additionally meals. The succulent chicken of a cottontail was positive consuming for John and his household.
In the present day Williams, who’s recovering from a stroke, has his personal 500-acre farm close to the place he grew up. He reaches into the pen and rubs the heads of eager-looking tri-color beagles and tells them to quiet down. You don’t have to speak to him lengthy earlier than he brings up Hustle, “one of the best canine ever.” Hustle is gone now, however that canine’s grandson remains to be a part of John Williams’ pack.

He can take his canines to his farm anytime he pleases. And he’s lucky to have a spot of his personal. After an extended profession at Central Foundry in Tuscaloosa, he opened Folks’s Shoe Renewal. And anyone who was anyone, from College of Alabama soccer coach Paul W. “Bear” Bryant to U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, purchased sneakers from him or took them to his store for repairs. Williams obtained to know folks, and that landed him invites to hunt on a few of the greatest land in western Alabama.

“It’s a must to know of us like I do know of us,” John Williams says. “I’ve lots of people who name me to hunt on their land.” He’s additionally lucky to have household who helps him get round and deal with his canines.

“I hunt slightly bit,” he says. “I can’t hunt like I used to, however I nonetheless like it.”

Daniel Williams, sadly, hasn’t obtained any youthful hunters to depend on. Arthritis in his legs makes it troublesome for him to get round. And when his spouse turned sick with most cancers, the couple spent all the things that they had on her remedies, which lasted till her demise three years in the past. He doesn’t have lots of spare cash to lease land or sustain a beagle pack.

Deer Trade

For rabbit hunters, all of it went dangerous within the Nineteen Eighties, because the deer inhabitants grew and hunters started to lease land. Deer-hunting practices modified, too. Till the Nineteen Seventies, deer looking within the South was largely executed with shotguns and buckshot on deer drives. Hunters gathered on weekends in teams of 30 to 40 and used canines to push deer out of briars and downed treetops within the hardwood swamps. That meant deer looking was confined to a couple weekends a 12 months within the deep woods. Weekdays and open farmland had been left to different hunters.

However as deer hunters shifted to treestand ambushes and looking over meals plots, it turned an increasing number of frequent for them to lease land solely for deer looking. That was what ultimately drove Bob Hagler out of rabbit looking. Now 77 years outdated, Hagler hasn’t had canines in about 15 years. Not like Daniel Williams and John Williams, he didn’t develop up rabbit looking. However when he moved again to his native Tuscaloosa from Akron, Ohio, to work on the B.F. Goodrich tire plant, buddies and associates obtained him into the game. He began out looking with buddies after which obtained his personal canines. The game shortly turned an obsession.

“You understand you’re within the enterprise when your veterinarian sends you a Christmas card yearly,” Hagler says with amusing. “Your canines go to the physician greater than you do.”

The issue was that Hagler was spending an increasing number of on looking and had fewer and fewer locations to go. Beagle pack house owners spend money and time on e-collars to coach their canines to not run deer. There are such a lot of deer all through a lot of the Deep South that it’s just about unattainable for canines to not cross their path. In the event that they aren’t damaged from operating deer, rabbit looking will shortly grind to a halt. However rabbit hunters have a troublesome time convincing deer hunters that their rabbit canines gained’t run deer. Deer hunters don’t need canines on their land throughout deer season for worry of spooking the whitetails, and that leaves rabbit hunters on the skin wanting in.

Rabbit hunters might lease land like deer hunters, and a few do. However it’s not fairly that straightforward. Rabbits require extra particular habitat than deer. And a beagle pack that begins on a hunter’s personal land can wind up on his neighbors’ property. There’s no higher strategy to create battle with neighboring deer hunters than for a pack of canines to cross their land whereas they’re looking.

“The little locations we needed to hunt earlier than and through deer season had been overhunted,” Hagler says. “Folks had been creating wealth by renting their land to deer hunters.”

Public land may be hunted throughout deer season, and lots of small-game hunters use it. However there may be lots of looking strain on public lands, and rabbit-hunting events don’t wish to stumble over one another. Additionally, many wildlife administration areas are managed with deer in thoughts, not small recreation. Fred Harders, assistant director of the Alabama Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries Division, notes that when the state obtained land for its Lowndes County WMA, the property had rabbit habitat.

“When the state first obtained it, it was excellent for rabbit looking,” says Harders. “However bushes had been planted and habitat modified. That successional habitat that rabbits used disappeared. If the habitat isn’t there, the rabbits gained’t be there. If the rabbits aren’t there, the hunters gained’t be there.”

Learn Subsequent: The Best Guns for Rabbit Hunting

Ultimately, expense, lack of alternative, and age are taking their toll on the rabbit-hunting traditions amongst black hunters within the Deep South. John Williams is lucky to have a son and a nephew who hunt with him. However youthful males by no means joined within the circle that Hagler and Daniel Williams hunted with. Hunters with canines often had a daily crew that hunted with them. Hagler knew of 10 or 12 such crews round Tuscaloosa when he was looking; now he is aware of of two.
“Most of them are deceased now,” Hagler says of his former companions. “The youthful folks, they’ve obtained the electronics. They’re not taken with looking. In the event that they didn’t have anyone who confirmed them the enjoyable in it, they don’t have any curiosity.”

Hagler needs extra folks did take curiosity and the game would dwell on. He hasn’t forgotten the enjoyable and fellowship of taking the sphere with an keen pack of beagles on a chilly winter morning.

This story, “A Vanishing Legacy,” was first printed within the Dec/Jan 2016/2017 concern of Out of doors Life.