iowa cottontails

[jim matuszewski]

anybody,know what the rabbit population is like? and maybe a lttle north,south,east,or west direction not looking for anybodys hunnyhole just kind of a general area for a starting point of like a 4-5 day hunt.

[dog]

Was out there a few years ago hunting Pheasants , we hunted the central part of the state and we jumped and shot a bunch of rabbits and they were big rabbits too

[rabbit chaser]

Jim I can tell you if there is habitat there will be rabbits but that in lies the problem. The corn prices at 7 bucks is KILLING our habatat. every good chunk of crp is getting disked up and all the hedgerows, ravines that I hunted as a kid are getting bulldozed under for an extra 1/4 acre of corn or beans. it makes me sick driving around seeing all my old hunting areas now in corn . With that being said places like the east central iowa beagle club that I run on quite a bit and have good habatat has an excellent rabbit crop this year but finding that habatat to shoot rabbits in (we dont shoot any on the beagle club grounds) can be like finding a needle in a haystack. On a side note how is the hare population up there? ive never seen a hare before

[bigjohn]

Go to the Iowa fish and games site and they have the results of road surveys on there.

[Big River Beagles S]

southeast is mediocre at best

[jim matuszewski]

thanks for the replyes guys,samething with the corn here in wi.theres even guys comming up from the valley planting corn in all the old farm feilds up here.rabbit chaser,hare numbers seem to be pretty good here,lots of the spots i run i don't do a lot of killing i'm not sure how they would hold up if i did.

[rabbit chaser]

yeah jim i hear ya. I don't shoot hardly any cottontails down here either. I'm just happy when I can get some jumped and ran especially in the winter. our coyote population is through the roof as well and that's not helping either. Now last winter was mild but we had several harsh ones before then so It should be interesting to see the numbers in coming winters if we have another mild winter or two. they seem to cycle and in highs and lows and it seems to be in a low as far as population right now. Jon