Some years ago, whilst laying prone in the long grass of one of my favourite ambush points, I became aware of something that until then had completely escaped my notice. In the far left-hand portion of my field of vision I spotted movement along the base of a hedgerow, about 40 yards distant. This was unexpected because I was set up, as usual, with a good field of fire over to the right. I was positioned this way in order to cover a spot along a fence line where rabbits mysteriously, but reliably, popped out of the undergrowth to graze. Tuning in to the movement, I tracked a rabbit as it wove its way left to right for 60 yards through the poles of the hawthorn hedge until pausing in the scrub below the fence momentarily and then bounding out onto the pasture.
This typical ‘latrine’ with a scrape in the background was probably left by a dominant buck marking the territory around his warren
Later, after taking that rabbit for the pot, I traced its path back along the hedge to a tangle of bramble, roughly the size of one of those modern cylindrical hay bales. Beneath that bramble patch was a warren. In that moment, I understood that my fieldcraft had hitherto been severely limited. I always knew where the rabbits might emerge, but had scant knowledge of where they came from and knew nothing of how they escaped my notice on their journeys about my hunting permission. This all motivated me to learn more about the habits of my favourite quarry Oryctolagus cuniculus (the European rabbit), in order to more effectively harvest this much-coveted resource.