2017: The Year of the Rabbit

This was The Year of the Rabbit. 

We’ve had The Year of the Duck, The Year of the Donkey, The Year of the Chicken (several times), The Year of the Miniature Horse, The Year of the Turkey and The Year of the Goat. 

They are so named, not because those animals arrived that year, or thrived and flourished that year …  or ever.  Rather, it’s because that’s the year they departed (Yes, Virginia, that’s a euphemism) usually involuntarily, and even if it was still the same year (or month) in which they had arrived.

It all began the day last spring Jim showed up with a singularly unattractive pink-eyed, white rabbit from Orcheln’s.  When I asked why, he said it was because Atwoods didn’t have any, which wasn’t what I meant, and he knew it.  It was for Betsy, he said.  That should have prepared me for the day soon after when he walked in with another box, this time from the humane society.  For Lucy, Jim said.  Apparently, this particular humane society hadn’t heard about us because it was relatively easy for Jim to get it: a pretty, soft-eyed bunny with velvet ears.  

“Don’t worry.  They’re both girls!” Jim said.  Our girls were ecstatic.

We just happened to have the perfect spot to set up a new home for them: a fenced-in garden off the master bathroom.  A windowed door conveniently opened from the bathroom to the garden.

I didn’t care about those hydrangeas Jim planted for me anyway, I told myself only a little wistfully as I watched the rabbits doggedly chew through the tender stems.  So Jim and the girls drove gaily off to pick up a dog house (Atwoods was out of rabbit hutches) and rabbit food.

Right from the start, the rabbits took to each other.  “That’s funny,” Jim once remarked as he watched them stretched out beside each other, nuzzling each other’s ears.  “I thought they said it could take females a couple of years to get to like each other.  Isn’t that sweet?”

The girls happily cared for them, filling the water bowl, keeping them well supplied with timothy hay and feed, laughing at how the silly rabbits burrowed under the dog house rather than sheltering in it, even during the spring rains, when the ground became saturated.  

Then there was that morning, about nine weeks later.   I was getting ready and glanced out the window where I spied a lumpy bit of white fluff just under the doorway to the doghouse.  Thinking the girls had left a washcloth or baby blanket outside, or more likely a stuffed animal, I opened the door for a closer look.

“Jim, what is that?” I asked as I stepped down out of the doorway and peered under the dog house. “It looks like the girls left a — OH MY GOSH! IS THAT A BABY RABBIT?!” 

In case you don’t know me well enough yet, let me just make it clear: that didn’t come out as a squeal of delight.  It was more of an accusation.

It did come out as a squeal of delight when Amanda repeated it a few minutes later, and it did when Betsy followed a bit after that.   But back to the story.

“What?” came Jim’s muffled query from the shower.

“Jim, you need to come see this.”

By now several bunnies had ventured out to just where we could see their quivering noses.  “Huh,” said the learned Dr. Manry, who took a biology class or two in college.  “I guess they weren’t both girls.”

Notice how earnestly Guv (behind the fence) watches his friends.

Yes sir, there were seven rabbits: a few white, a few black, one that was mostly white with a black mustache … a female (or doe), of course. 

We didn’t discover them till they had their fur and were moving around independently.  They’d managed to grow, safe from predators (including our dogs) in their custom-made burrow for the first few weeks of their lives.  In fact, by the time they crept out from under the dog house, they were barely nursing anymore.  So the mama was capable of getting pregnant again, which she promptly did.  

Woody and pal

There was another litter about six weeks later.  It was around about then I told Jim the father would have to go.  Paying $70 to neuter a $20 rabbit seemed excessive.  Anyway, we had a bunch more males (or bucks) now, and we weren’t paying to neuter all of them.  The easiest thing to do would be to get rid of the guiltiest party and deal with the others sooner (my preference) or later (everybody else’s preference).

The father, who had never liked people and made this clear by scratching up their arms whenever they tried to hold him, was summarily carried out to the lagoon where there were quite a few scrubby trees, offering him as good a chance of survival as any white rabbit was going to get in a wide-open Kansas field.  Jim later informed me the male was reluctant to leave his arms and at one point turned to him and said, with his big, pink eyes, “Jim? Buddy?  Ole Pal? I thought we were friends!”

With so many babies around — 15, give or take a bunch — the kids got over the loss of a parent (rabbit) pretty quickly.  Kind of like in a Disney movie.  At this stage they were cute and small, and most importantly, couldn’t get away from the girls even if they tried.  The boys fell under their spell, too.  It got so I couldn’t take a shower for fear of walking by the window with any number of kids sitting on the doorstep, bunnies spilling out of their laps.  

It was, as Jim said, therapeutic.  So much so that even the cousins from Washington, when they came for summer vacation, would hop out of the pool, climb the low fence, and scoop up a rabbit to cuddle in the hammock or patio chair, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

Evening devotionals migrated to the back patio where the boys would pull up a chair by the koi pond, bunny draped over their legs, and lean back, eyes closed, as the cicadas droned overhead in the honey locust trees, almost drowning out Jim's voice as he read from the Bible.  

Woody built the bunnies an obstacle course from PVC pipe.  Soon, the rabbits took to hiding in the pipes whenever they reached their quota of being manhandled too often by too many people.  This didn't work in their favor since all the kids had to do was tip the pipe up, and out they'd slide: plop, plop, plop.  

Jacob, friend and Guv

Lucy (in front), Gracie and a perfect afternoon

The rabbits’ presence fairly drove Guvnah, our english pointer, crazy.  From the time he bolted out the door each morning, till the time we dragged him back in at night by his collar, he dashed back and forth along the fence, barking and yipping till he was hoarse.  If we sat with them outside the fence, he crowded near, fairly drooling on their fur.

We figured we had just a couple of months before the does all came of bearing age, so Jim moved the small greenhouse over to Amanda’s depot and enclosed an adjoining yard in sturdy fencing.  The bucks would live here, the does in the original habitat, and everything would work out, for once (we thought), without something having to die.  But we hadn’t counted on the rabbits.  

On the night Jim separated them into their designated living quarters, the bucks somehow managed to climb up the four-foot-high enclosure that even had hog wire bent over the top in an inverted u-shape to protect them from circling hawks.  When we woke up the next morning, they were all back together, one big, happy, incestuous family.

From that point on, the rabbits came and left as they pleased.  It turned out all of them had been getting out or in whenever they wished, which would explain why Guv would sometime run off barking in some distant corner of the back property, rather than hovering in his usual favored spot.  And we resigned ourselves to the usual high mortality rate that clings embarrassingly, like white cat hair on a black party dress, to our farm.

Sure enough, Guv did manage to get a few.  Others, we assume, were carried off by the usual hawks and owls that have only increased in number since word got around the Manrys lived in this neck of the woods.  We are down to four now, with just the mama showing any sense: she’s the only one we know for certain doesn’t climb the fence.

Yesterday the girls came in laughing at all the dirt the bunnies had been throwing out onto the brick patio in their enclosure as they dig a new burrow. 

Nesting again.  That’s okay, I lie.  I always wanted baby bunnies for Christmas.