doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Ot fO jO, Grand pappy & mammy thread.

Another of my Grandpa hunting stories, but this is more of a just pure vermin killing story.
The type of country our farms & orchids were in was a kind of sand hill country. There was flat ground in between old sand hills that looked like they were blown by the wind a long time ago. Then they covered with trees & shrubs & in those days were mostly not cleared & farmed. The sand hills all ran in the same direction N-S for many miles & crossed the landscape at about 3/4 to a mile apart. Open irrigation channels ran along the contour of the hillside & the water flowed down from there to irrigate the flats. We had no pumps or sprinklers in those days to irrigate the hills so they were natural vegetation.
Our place was from the back side of one of these to the centre top of the next. So the rise of the sand hill was at the back of the home block.

In those days the rabbits were plentiful because the Dep't of Agriculture had not yet released the diseases into the population. The rabbits were pests in the crops & they attracted foxes which hunted them & our poultry. Most of this vermin population lived on or in the sand hills where the digging was easy for making a burrow. The usual method of control was called rabbit ripping, where a larger tractor of the time like an IH WD6 or similar had a deep ripping tyne on the three point linkage & was used to rip & collapse the warrens in on the hapless occupants.

Well, Grandpa had a different idea, as usual. We would load up our kit on the trailer & it consisted of a piece of steel flex pipe with a rubber hose attached, a shovel, a knapsack sprayer filled with petrol. A 20 foot long plastic conduit with a wire threaded through it which was connected to a spark plug from a car fitted into one end. A magneto ignition off an old hit & miss engine. A single barrel Winchester 12g shotgun & shells. We hooked this onto a Grey TE 20 Ferguson petrol tractor & headed up the hill to the rabbit warrens.

We would hook up the flex pipe & hose to the tractors exhaust & put it down one hole & fill in & pack it tight at the opening. then go around the warren & fill in all but one hole.
Start the tractor & pull a few revs on & pull the choke out.
The tractor would go blert blert blert & pump fumes out the exhaust into the warren. One of us would wait at the open hole with the 12g & whoever brer rabbit or brer fox would come out all bleary eyed & coughing to the welcome of a face full of number fours. We used this method mainly when we thought there was a fox down there.

If there were just rabbit foot prints at the burrows then we put the plastic conduit pipe with the spark plug end right down in there, then got the knapsack sprayer & misted petrol down the holes & let that all circulate through for a while. We then shoveled dirt into all the holes & jump it down a bit then hooked the wire coming up the conduit from the spark plug to the magneto.
Give the magneto a spin & WWHhoomph the whole warren would lift about a foot & collapse back down thereby burying those blasted rabbits.

Mum did not like it too much but I can tell you that we sure did.
Brings a smile to my dial even now.

O.M

That's some Mad Max chit...

Guess there was more to that movie than met the eYe.

Some more chit better left untold.

Just my observation.

Well, again your observation is chit.
Is it better left untold that to this day the deep ripping of rabbit warrens is still the preferred method of control ?
Or that the rabbits are baited with 1080 & Pindone ?
Or that now they are fumigated down the burrows using Phosphine as in aluminium phosphide tablets ?
Or that foxes get the same treatment ?
Very sporting old chap.

You have commented on so much of late that you are now commenting on things you know nothing about.
That is my observation.

O.M

O.M.,
Very few North American residents understand anything about game management in your part of the world. We have been very successful here using the N.A. model of game management but that model is not universal. What works here does not necessarily work everywhere. On my first trip to New Zealand I bought several books on NZ hunting and was shocked at the numbers of game taken and often just for the heads. Completely contrary to our thinking. Then I began talking to the locals and seeing the pictures of rivers filled with dead deer poisoned by 1080 and the pictures of the hill eaten bare taken in the 50's. I soon began to see the problems and solutions were different than what I had known at home. Having seen rabbits in thousands I can only imagine the damage they can do. Please continue to share your stories of growing up down under in a rural area. Some of us do enjoy reading them and can appreciate them, I do.
Steve

Steve'O I can actually see you liking that kind of thing.

They done about took all their guns away I guess they got to do something.

The Night Rider lives....

Thanks Steve.
Deer are declared vermin here as well as NZ.
I hunt them on alfalfa crops at night with a spotlight & 308.
In the day from a dirt bike with a Win 94 30-30.
All legal & ethical.
O.M

Quite a few interesting deer species in Australia and NZ. I took a nice free range Red and a decent Fallow in NZ. A Rusa and Sambar hunt is something I would like to do some day.

Pissing on Steve again. You know that the skin of an elephant in or out of musth is up to an inch thick.

They done did not about took all our guns away. More you know nothing about yet are willing to comment.

Anyone here is the night rider I suspect you. Did you go to bed & sleep or were you up riding this forum all night.
10:05 PM here

O.M

I think about Hemingway out in Sun Valley ID-- pre-WW11- one of the mainstay farms they hunted for pheasants was the Friese family farm, near Dietrich-- Hemingway organized the jack rabbit drives, as they were cleaning out the hay stacked out in the fields- which the farm family needed to feed their livestock- all the game the group shot was dressed out, and given to the family (13 in number perhaps) --

Gary Cooper preferred the "sniper" approach to this situation He was a crack shot with his scoped M70 in .257R- love to shoot coyotes, fox, jack rabbits and bobcats-- assume when the did the Hemingway shuffle on the jack rabbits they all used shotguns--

Hemingway also would "pass the hat" and take up cash donations from the hunting party and help out the farmer and his family- tractor or truck repairs, parts, feed and seed money- etc.

But I have no problem with you and your Grandpa "doing the C-4 routine, all boys love to set off fireworks and explosive stuff- RWTF

Don't you live in Australia moses? We sure see a lot of information concerning the onerous restrictions on the rights of firearms owners there. Of course, you guys never had a 2nd Amendment to worry about anyway. Do you think your Grand pappy ever worried about Gun Control? Liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton promised to try to bring that Australian crap here if she won. Some FUDD's here voted for her anyway. You just can't fix stupid.

Is this propaganda? Or should we just fire up the old Massey Ferguson and hunt birds or ward off criminals with a bit of exhaust gas or a chisel plow?













Maybe we can start a fun thread where we all try to identify confiscated guns in these photos before they get crushed and melted down! That one on top gotta have 40" barrels.