Jack Rabbit 



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according to latitude, in the North, where only one or two litters 

 are born each season, June is about as early as the young ones 

 ever make their appearance. 



When first born they are well furred and have their eyes 

 open, by the time they are a week old they are active and pretty 

 well able to look out for their own safety, and at the end of a 

 month or two are weaned and may leave their parents and start 

 out to get a living for themselves. 



They feed on buffalo grass and weeds of various sorts and 

 the leaves and bark of shrubs and low bushes. In the South 

 where grease-wood and cactus are abundant they fare well; and 

 wherever men cultivate the land, the jack rabbits make themselves 

 at home at once and stuff on garden vegetables, alfalfa and 

 the bark of young orchard trees and so get themselves disliked. 



In a natural state their numbers are apparently held in check 

 more by scarcity of forage than by the inroads of their enemies, 

 and just as soon as cultivation yields them abundant fodder, they 

 increase to an alarming extent, in spite of the farmers' efforts to 

 destroy them. 



The eagle, the Western red-tailed hawk, the prairie falcon and 

 the marsh hawk occasionally kill jack rabbits, especially the young 

 ones, but their most destructive foes, next to man, are the wolves 

 and foxes. The coyote is particularly successful in hunting them, 

 and near the border of the woods the gray fox and bob-cat kill 

 them in considerable numbers. 



In regions where the coyotes have been killed and driven off 

 it has almost invariably followed that the jack rabbits have so 

 multiplied as to prove a much more destructive nuisance than the 

 coyotes had ever been. 



Occasionally an epidemic reduces their numbers locally, but 

 a very few seasons usually serve to establish them again in their 

 former numbers. 



During the fall and winter jack rabbits are hunted and killed 

 in great numbers, the most popular method seems to be shoot- 

 ing them from waggons or buckboards with the assistance of dogs 

 who start the jacks from their cover and bring in the game when 

 it is killed. One man will sometimes kill five or six dozen jack- 

 rabbits in a day in this manner. 



The greatest number, however, are killed in drives, an area 

 several miles in extent is beaten over by men on horseback who 



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