We have had a growing family of rabbits living underneath the raised garden shed. Over the past several years, I have had to:
bury one that I found deceased on my birthday;
seen the fur remains of several who were taken for coyote meals;
watched bunnies grow to maturity;
witnessed rabbits playfully chasing one another; and
smiled at their ample foraging around the yard - especially at twilight.
Two mornings ago, I saw this huge rabbit eating his way through the clover and grasses near my home. He began nibbling the dandelions - both the yellow flowers as well as the puffballs. This image shows him just after he bit the pappus (the white fluffy bristles), eating some of the seeds and dispersing the rest. He then plucked the stem from the ground and consumed it entirely before moving on to the next flower.
https://earthsky.org/earthsky-community-photos/entry/49067/
What follows are a few brief reflections on rabbits from this morning’s writing prompt:
Rabbits are a touchstone to Sage, my beloved canine friend and daughter, who chased them relentlessly at a local park where people saw it fitting to release captive Easter rabbits a few months after the holiday when their children had tired of them. She’d heartily chase them but was never into the capture. Sage would bolt toward them at full speed (which WAS very fast!) and then she’d stop a few inches short and move into her meditative crouch mode. She was truly just in it for the thrill of the hunt.
Oddly, for the first year and half that we lived here, I never saw rabbits. Perhaps too many dogs, including Sage, ran rampant through their breakfast grasses.
But six months after Sage passed away, on my way to be with Mama as she lay dying in a room in Tacoma, I was stopped on the road. Just a few properties away on the unpaved exit from my home, a rabbit was crossing the narrow isthmus of gravel atop the culvert of my watershed; this is the same place where I did a ceremony for healing for the waters of the Earth last week. I hadn’t seen or been aware of leporids around my home before that 2018 sighting. Since then, they have been part of this wonderful community of people (L. Wells, 2022) who live on this property.
I lost my sweet, faithful, blissfully co-dependent, longtime, canine friend and savior in March and my vibrant watercolorist, devoted, underdog-loving, storytelling, nature-loving mom in October of that same year. I had long feared, with a sort of prescience I couldn’t explain, that I would l lose Sage and Mama around the same time. I did.
The rabbit whose photo just got published on EarthSky is now part of a clan of rabbits who have been present, living, and visible on this property since that late 2018 double-death time.
I marvel at how that rabbit the other morning ate whole dandelions in just a few swallows, fully taking in the stems, too. Nothing wasted. Everything savored.
I’m bittersweetly fond of these rabbits, feeling that Sage’s absence is one of the reasons they’ve now taken up residence near me.
We are vigilant on the rare occasions that we drive up the property just after dark since that is one of our neighbors’ most active feeding times.
The ability to track the rabbits’ movements by following the piles of small-pebble-feces they leave in their wake is fascinating. I often mourn that I cannot shrink myself so that I can crawl under that shed, into their burrows, and become part of their warren for a while.
It amazes me how absolutely quiet these rabbits are, and what silence and stillness they require of me when I am observing them.
