DIGHTON ? Longtime farmer Rod Bentley recalls getting out of school to participate in community jackrabbit drives during the Dust Bowl era. When he was a teenage farm boy, his family’s west-central Kansas crop suffered from pests.

He didn’t know how many jackrabbits populated the west-central Kansas prairie, but it seemed there were a ton of them.

After drives killed thousands of rabbits, along with colder winters, the big-eared, black-tailed jackrabbit became a rare hare on the arid terrain.

Now, amid a multiyear drought, the jackrabbit is making a strong comeback to this region of the Great Plains.

“You see a lot more along the roads,” said Bentley, an 84-year-old who still lives on his family’s Shields-area farm. “I think we have at least double the rabbits of a year ago.”

So is it with the grasshoppers, locusts and other species that seem to thrive in dry weather.

Bentley said he was about 14 when he went on his first jackrabbit drive.

The black-tailed jackrabbit was thick during the 1930s drought, eating wheat and grass down to the ground. They were so thick that legislators even proposed changing the word antelope to jackrabbit in the chorus of “Home on the Range” before it was adopted as the state song in 1947.

Neighborhood drives were organized to eradicate the rabbits.

County residents would form a several-mile-wide circle, walking toward a fenced-in area in the center. The jackrabbits then were herded into the fence, where they were bludgeoned.

“A baseball bat worked real good, or a limb about 4 inches in diameter,” Bentley said. “But I could never make myself get in and club rabbits to death.”

He saw jackrabbits increase again during a drought period in the 1950s, then didn’t see the numbers again until recently.

Although it hasn’t reached the size of past populations, there is a definite increase, western Kansas farmers say.