Jul 17 2008
When animals don’t attack!
When I mow the lawn or weed the garden behind the house, I always watch for Mr. Toad, the amphibian that suns himself near the garden. It’s not unusual for him to leap suddenly from the grass or scurry into the flowerbed.
So today when I was coming around the side of the deck, I wasn’t particularly surprised to see movement in the grass head of me. But it was too fast and furry to be a toad and too slow to be a chipmunk. It was followed by a small explosion of other bodies running away from the horrible Mower of Earsplitting Doom.
Bunnies! Two itsy bitsy rabbits went hopping through the grass and into the garden along the privacy fence. One remained in the grassy nook between the trunks of the maple cluster until it, too, lost its nerve and made a run for the greenery. Since I like the lawn is little longer and my yard is relatively dog-free, the backyard must have looked like a little sanctuary (until I began mowing).
I figured that their mother had left them in what she thought was a safe place, so I kept mowing. Then she burst from the garden and ran away, leaving the three little ones behind. I got a nice look at them, since they weren’t sure at first if I were evil, too. They are very young, so that their ears are more round than long, and I could hold them in one hand (which I wouldn’t). Then they voted that although I didn’t make a lot of racket, I was clearly a Hateful Beast. They hid in the mums.
Mother took several hours return. She was none too subtle, either. I looked up and there she was in front of the deck, scratching her ear. I moved and she hopped over to the corner of the deck, “hidden” by a statue of Our Lady. I could see one exquisite black pool of an eye staring at me. Once in a while the long fuzzy frond of an ear would twitch into view.
While she waited, the three youngsters came out from the garden. I left the deck and moved to the bedroom to get a better view from that window and saw something unusual: a wild rabbit grooming her brood while they nursed.
I took some nice photos before she spooked and hid in the sedum. Then I realized there were FIVE babies. Cute ones, too.
How lovely!!! I’ve never watched rabbits nurse or groom…
I do remember, though, when I was about ten or twelve, our collie MacDuff found a nest of baby rabbits in a pile of brush right by our driveway. I remember my father trying to call him back, thinking he would hurt the rabbits, but instead Duffy very gently picked one up in his muzzle to bring to my dad. (He was a very good, gentle dog.) It was very sweet.
Oh, that’s such a great memory. So you had a good dog and a devil dog in your past, Kasia?
I’d never seen wild rabbits up so close. When I was a kid, there was a nest in a hole at the base of a fencepost. My fahter uncovered it when he was taking the fence down, so he left the pole there. We weren’t allowed to go near it until the babies left, and then we saw it was lined with rabbit fur.
It’s really funny how careful my father was with that nest because he was constantly coming up with new ways to thwart critters who wanted into our garden.