We know how tough a hunter must be to kill certain big-game animals. For example, high altitudes and rough, rugged terrain make hunts for bighorn sheep and mountain goats extremely challenging. Killing a moose, caribou, musk ox or even a trophy elk may take you to environs so wild and hostile, you fear you'll get lost, frozen, maimed or worse.
When talking about small-game hunting, particularly here in Arkansas, the word "tough" rarely enters the conversation. But before you can draw a bead on some of The Natural State's small-game animals, you'll have to prove your mettle by trudging through ankle-deep mud, stagnant water and dense aquatic vegetation in some of the most inhospitable terrain in the South. Even then, some of these creatures are so wily and elusive, you may hunt for days before you get your first shot -- if you get a shot at all.
Swamp Rabbit
The swamp rabbit, the largest member of the cottontail family, inhabits flooded river bottoms and swamp thickets where hunters need webbed feet to have a sporting chance. Swamp rabbits are common on many Arkansas bottomland wildlife management areas such as Bayou Meto and Rex Hancock Black Swamp.
"This is tough hunting," one aficionado told me. "We put our feet 1,000 times in places the human foot wasn't designed to go and fight through thickets that appear impassable, all for the fleeting chance of getting a snap shot at a brown blur that can't decide if it wants to be terrestrial or aquatic."
A swamp rabbit before a dog has more wits than a coyote, more speed than a fox. The swamp rabbit won't run a tight circle like a cottontail but traces huge ellipses, parabolas and figure eights through its swampy homeland, often taking more than an hour to make a single round through its large territory.
To make things even more difficult, swamp rabbits can swim almost as well as an otter. When the rabbits are chased, they'll paddle a good distance downstream, then exit the water in thick cover to throw the hunting dogs off their track. Then the rabbits will dive beneath the water's surface and hide under root wads and log jams with just their noses sticking out.
According to one of my outdoor writer buddies, "Hunting swamp rabbits is a sport demanding the strategy of a war general, the shooting skill of a biathlete, the intuition of a riverboat gambler, the lungs and legs of a marathon runner, the dog-handling talents of a professional trainer and the patience of Job."
When you hunt these giant cottontails, be prepared to wade water, slog through mud and fight your way through dense vines and thorny cover. "Challenging" describes a swamper chase in more ways than one, but bagging a few of these jumbo rabbits for the dinner table makes it all worthwhile.
Snipe
If you thought "snipe hunting" was just a hoax played on naive kids, think again. Snipe are real, and they're very sporty game birds. About 30,000 hunters pursue the birds each year from California to New England, including a handful of hardy Arkansans. But the difficulties of hunting these long-billed shorebirds in the open marshes, mud flats and rice fields where they live keep the average hunter's harvest at just about three birds per season, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Snipe hunters quickly learn to wear waterproof boots and prepare for intense muscular exertion. The birds are usually taken by jump shooting, and walking is often through water and muck up to the knees.
On top of this, when a snipe is flushed, it has no idea where it's going, which makes shooting one very difficult. The bird rises, darts a few yards one way, changes its mind and turns at right angles to its original course. Then it appears to think it has made a mistake and once more alters its direction. This eccentric flight pattern puzzles many sportsmen, and some who are capital shots at other birds can never calculate the movements of snipe.
Hunting pressure makes the birds steadily wilder, even though it may not cause them to abandon good areas. After just one day of shooting, the birds may get so spooky that you're wasting your time, and it's possible to walk for hours, putting up scores of snipe, without a single one in range. Any hunter who bags two birds for every five shots fired deserves all the respect he can muster. Few game birds are as delicious.
Gallinules
Purple gallinules and common gallinules, two water birds closely related to coots, are probably the least common and least hunted of Arkansas game birds. Both species are legal game during open seasons, but their ability to walk atop floating marsh and swamp vegetation with their long slender toes allows them to live in thick out-of-the-way cover where hunters only get brief glimpses of their quarry.
Look for these handsome birds in or near dense vegetation around quiet, shallow ponds, marshes and lake edges. They're typically seen walking on lily pads or feeding along the edges of open water. When disturbed, they seek cover in heavy vegetation. They constantly pump their heads and tails when walking, and their flight is slow and weak.
The toughest hunters might slip stealthily through a marshy, mucky lake or heavily vegetated pond shore to try and bag a few gallinules while wading. But hunting these little-known game birds is easier if you use a boat. Lightweight johnboats and canoes are most serviceable because they are more easily maneuvered over and through weeds and grass.
A good technique is to spot the birds from long distances with binoculars and motor to a position about 100 yards away. Then pole or paddle close, slowly and quietly, for a shot. By law, the boat can't be under power (even drifting from a shutdown engine) when a hunter shoots.
If you somehow manage to bag a limit of 15 gallinules, take a bow. While these rail relatives are plentiful in some areas, bagging more than a dozen on a day's hunt would put you in a very small class of extraordinary sportsmen. Were you to kill a swamp rabbit or snipe on the same hunt, you could call yourself a super hunter.
NW News on 12/18/2018