Bog Myrtle & Peat

My ferrets are quite the most charming little beasts I have ever come across. Perhaps it is the same defensive pride a parent feels as their yowling child tears down a curtain and jabs a plastic knife into a passing teacher, but as far as I am concerned, they can do no wrong.

One thing that has surprised me about the little tykes is the sheer quantity of food that they are able to put away. Within a single day, they can reduce a breasted woodpigeon into a ruin of feathers and feet. Bones, beaks and guts vanish without a trace. Over two days, they can fully dissect a rabbit, dissolving the comparatively large carcass into a vague assortment of shreds and fibres. Since I bought them, they have eaten cockerel, hen, ‘pigeon, rabbit, venison, roadkill pheasant and a variety of “oops! out of date” meat from Tesco. It is heartening that they have such tremendous appetites, but I have had to keep them stocked up with wildlife accordingly.

It seems to have been a tremendous year for rabbits in Galloway, and driving to Carrick shores for some lamping on Friday night with my friend Richard, it was with a view to picking up some free meat for the ferrets. Richard shoots the vermin on a large area of land overlooking the Fleet estuary and the Murray Isles, and on the assurance that we would come across more than enough rabbits to make the fifty minute journey worthwhile, I headed off to meet him as darkness fell over the Solway.

Within a few feet of the gate, we had made a start. Rabbits tumbled back and forth in the red filtered lamping torch as we picked them off from the back of the freelander with a semi-automatic .22 rimfire. After we had taken a dozen, I stopped to take out their grass bags and check their livers in the headlights. Bats like swallows zoomed through the headlight beams, and I could hear their leathery wings twitch and crackle in the air just inches over our heads.

I noticed for the first time quite recently that rabbits are extremely susceptible to liver fluke. Gutting a young buck rabbit about a month ago, I saw that it had nasty yellow pustules throughout its liver tissue. Cutting through one of them, it leaked thick cream out onto my fingers. The ferrets always eat the liver first, and I didn’t really like the idea of them chowing down on infected tissue, so I threw the entire rabbit away. I’m told that liver fluke is caused by rabbits having access to wet ground, but I definitely need to find out more about it. After around two hours of lamping, we had almost twenty bunnies in the bag and decided to head home.

The freezer has been running on overdrive ever since I got the ferrets, but it is quite clear from how bright eyed and bushy tailed my boys are that they appreciate my efforts to keep them constantly supplied with game.