POTTING THE BLACK

Phil Hardman sets himself a specific rabbit challenge

Usually when hunting, a lot of emphasis is placed upon the total number of kills you achieve per session; the higher the number, the more successful and enjoyable the hunt, right? In many cases that is true, but kill numbers only tell a very small part of the story, and whilst big bags can be extremely satisfying, so too can the small ones. Hunting is all about the challenge; it’s us versus nature, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, pitted against a decade or two’s worth of hunting experience, with some technology to bridge the gap. Often, the challenge is to cull as many individual animals as possible, and this is the nature of pest control, and the primary reason most of us have the permission over which we hunt, but every once in a while I like to take some time out to hunt, not for pest control, but for the pure pleasure of it.

DIFFERENT CHALLENGE

Trophy hunters often will target a specific animal, hunting and tracking it sometimes for seasons, for years, before they eventually get it. This is a different type of hunting, more personal, not versus a species, but an actual individual, and it’s a completely different type of challenge. I have only really ever hunted with an airgun, which means you often don’t get the chance to do this – one squirrel looks very much like the next, a rat is a rat – but over the years, I have had a few chances at some rarer morphs. I once spotted a leucistic crow, identifiable by white patches on its wings, and it took me two months to bag it, but bag it I did.