Rabbits
run rampant
Bugs Bunny's cousins make good on campus
By Callan Bentley
Flat Hat Variety Editor
Walking through the Sunken Gardens one night, I saw a lump sitting in the dark shadows along the edge of the field. I sidled up to it and saw that the lump was actually a rabbit. It was nibbling grass and paying me only a small amount of attention. I stayed and watched him hopping and munching for a quarter of an hour. Though the rabbit isn't exactly an exciting animal, it gave me pleasure to see a wild critter of any sort visiting on this manicured area staked out as Man's. Usually the intrusions are the other way around; man shows up unannounced, and the result is habitat loss and death for rabbits and their wild brethren.
The rabbit I saw was an eastern
cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus), the most common rabbit in this area. The
species is distinguished by a rust-colored nape over grayish-brown fur above,
and white on its belly. It also has white feet and a white underside to the
tail, warranting its name. Its ears are stereotypically long, compared to its
foot-and-a-half long body.
The range of the eastern
cottontail covers the entire eastern half of the United States, and also extends
into Mexico and Central America.
My family has had a couple
of rabbits as pets over the years. We have always enjoyed their playful antics
and floppy cuteness, and so have visiting friends. Little kids always wanted
to pet the rabbits, showing none of the fear that they might toward a dog or
cat. Rabbits, it seems, are the epitome of adorably harmless.
We named our rabbits Fiver
and Bigwig after the leading characters in Watership Down, Richard Adams' epic
story of rabbit society. Fiver died several years ago, and Bigwig passed on
over the semester break. These pets and their cousins out in natural meadows
have inspired hundreds of literary characters over the years. From Bre'r Rabbit
to Peter Rabbit to the March Hare, Little Bunny Foo-Foo, and Bugs Bunny, the
rabbit is a species well inculcated to American culture. They are one of the
most popular animals around.
Despite humankind's fascination with bunnies, rabbit-watching has never caught
on as an activity due to the fact that rabbits are rather difficult to find.
Birds, in contrast, are seen every day, often in exposed vantages on tree limbs
and rooftops. Rabbits stay hidden under bushes and in burrows, and come out
only when people are sufficiently scarce. Seeing one, therefore, is all the
more special.
Even if you don't actually
see a rabbit, you can tell if they have been there before. The small, woody
sprigs they eat are cut off cleanly and at an angle. You can differentiate these
from sprigs eaten by deer, which will be raggedly torn, a consequence of the
deer's lacking upper incisors. Rabbits will also strip trees of their bark to
a height of three to four inches when snow cover is deep, but you are unlikely
to find that situation ever happening around Williamsburg.
Their droppings are small
dark pea-sized and -shaped pellets, often found in piles. Rabbits also excrete
equivalently sized green droppings, but they use these in the act of coprophagia:
They re-consume the soft green droppings to digest them anew and absorb any
nutrients that they might have missed the first time around. While coprophagia
might seem nauseating to some people, it actually seems to work quite well for
the rabbits. By any accounts, these are a very successful group of animals.
One reason rabbits are so
successful is their habit of producing fantastic numbers of offspring. Within
hours after giving birth to a litter of up to nine young, the female is pregnant
again, and can produce up to four litters each summer. This means that, if no
young died, a pair of rabbits and their offspring could produce 350,000 rabbits
in five years!
Of course, many young do
die, and the population remains fairly constant (if the habitat isn't destroyed).
Few rabbits live for more than a year, as a matter of fact. Rabbits are a main
link in many food chains; Many native animals, including humans, eat them.
When rabbits were introduced to Australia several decades ago, the lack of natural
predators there allowed the rabbit population to explode. More and more rabbits
ate more and more food, and soon there wasn't enough left for native species
such as the kangaroo. Australia is currently engaged in an expensive and time-consuming
program that has as its goal the extermination of the introduced rabbits.
In the U.S., killing rabbits
isn't such a necessity, but it is often viewed as good sport. The epitome of
adorably harmless is often viewed through crosshairs.
So, when you encounter a
rabbit munching grass in the Sunken Gardens some evening, cherish the sight.
As Williamsburg's forests are replaced with outlet malls, rabbits will get more
and more rare.