With little to no fanfare, the rabbit and ruffed grouse season opened this past Saturday in Pennsylvania.

The season for them runs until Dec. 24 while rabbit reopens Dec. 26 and closes Feb. 28.

As for grouse, our majestic state bird prefers a mountainous habitat and are tough to hunt as they customarily stick to heavy, thick cover that’s typically found on the Blue Mountain and Pocono Mountain areas. This means some tough trekking to find them. If you’re lucky to get a flush, their take-off is thunderous, powerful and fast. Upon being startled by a grouse flush, hunters have to be able to get off a quick shot as they’ll be gone in a second.

According to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the grouse population seems cyclic and undergoes fluctuations from low to high numbers of birds that span periods of five to 10 years. If my memory serves me correctly, I believe the PGC had a moratorium on them for a season some time ago. And their numbers differ in certain regions due to local cover, food, weather and disease. Grouse, says the PGC, will not tolerate crowding as the minimum area needed to support a single brood is about nine acres.

Unlike the aforementioned, rabbits are plentiful, unfortunately most are in the city of Allentown than there are in suburban farm areas in Lehigh/Northampton counties. In farm and woodlots, hawks, great-horned owls, foxes and coyotes customarily eliminate them.

A buddy who lives in Salisbury Township had a cage trap out for squirrels that he’d trapped and transferred them elsewhere. One morning he checked the trap and a rabbit was inside and completely skinned. He can only surmise a fox chased it inside the trap but his large body wouldn’t let the trap door close so he began his feast inside the trap.

I, too, awoke one morning to find a partially skinned rabbit in my back yard. Of course I had to dispose of it but in checking our security cameras the next day when our driveway alarm went off at 3 a.m., I discovered a red fox was sniffing and searching the same spot for the rabbit it likely killed the night before.

Interestingly, the scarcity of rabbits in farmland areas prompted the PGC to put out bounties on them years ago. My late, dear friend and mentor Tom Fegely, who lived in Limeport in his youth, told me that back then the PGC would pay folks one dollar a rabbit for trapped live ones that they would transfer to farm areas. In checking with the PGC’s media relations office for more information on that program, no one seemed to know about it as new PGC employees weren’t around when that occurred.

TROUT STOCKING

Locally, the Little Lehigh Creek was stocked last week and the week before additional trout were stocked for a handicapped program in one section. So there should be lots of leftovers for anglers to fish for.