Ken Duck’s humane rabbit trap. Nice piece of woodworking, Mr. Duck!
This post is courtesy of fellow Manassas Chorale member and aerospace enthusiast Ken Duck. We’ve known Ken and his wife Myrtle for years: he’s a gentle and affable sort who also plays in a band (not a rock band, but one using instruments like horns and reeds), and Myrtle is a smiling and sharp lady who taught both our girls math. Enjoy Mr. Duck’s tale of rabbits run amok and his solution…and he did not call on Elmer Fudd to hunt wabbits…because as the Geico commercial might say, “Elmer Fudd can’t hunt wabbits because he’s not real. He’s a cartoon, and cartoon characters can’t hunt real rabbits.”
As many of you who know Mike, Zuill, John, and me, must understand by now that we are badly frustrated by rabbits, especially on Station Four at the Bull Run Shooting Center sporting clays course. Mike, Zuill, and John know that, as I often do when facing a challenge, I built a mathematical model of the situation, and it worked… once! Myrtle has now developed her own rabbit frustration, i.e., a 3/4 grown rabbit is chowing down on all the expensive plants in her new garden. As cute as he is, M is about to go postal on him. She even bought a trout net at Target to try to catch him for relocation. Me, being a bit of a smart aleck, offered to lend her the Beretta 12 gauge or the Benelli 20 gauge to deal with the problem, once and for all. She feels my suggestion would not work because:
1. She’d probably shoot herself in the foot;
2. The neighbors, the rabbit, and Prince William County’s finest would not be happy, especially in the middle of the night when the critters typically dine.
All that being said, I decided to take a different tack, namely, to build a live trap and take the captured bunny deep in the forest, spin him around fourteen times and release him to the wild. I remembered that my eccentric Uncle Bernie, my mom’s oldest brother, who farmed at night because it was cooler, used to have similar traps near all his crops because he liked to eat rabbits, and any trapped rabbit didn’t pilfer his crops either.
I must say that my trap looks a bit more finished than my uncle’s. This fine trap has now been baited with fresh carrots and spinach and placed in the garden. Tomorrow, I’ll publish chapter 2, especially if I’m successful. This project has kept me off the street and out of saloons all afternoon long.
Can you guess what M wants now? She has a Bambi problem too. Do you think this trap could be scaled up to deer size? It would certainly need wheels for portability.
Ken
I’ll post the results of this episode of Call of the Wild when I get them!
Biscuit City 
A wooden Have-A-Heart! How getting some VC and start a start-up? Can I have one by Friday? We’re going to Vinalhaven on Saturday – the rabbit center of Penobscot Bay. We’re looking forward to Day 2.
David & Carol