...Except for Bunnies

[jaunthie]

When I was small, one of the many delights of visiting Grandma on the farm was the possibility of seeing the cottontailed rabbits. Small, brown, with fluffy white tails, they sometimes foraged by the dirt track that led from the ranch house's gravel driveway to the farm equipment shed. I guessed that their warren was somewhere behind the impenetrable bushes lining the creekward side of the track, but I could never get back there far enough to find it. You had to be quiet, careful, and lucky to see them; they were wild and throughly wary of any movement. Hardly suprising I realize now, given the local coyote and cat populations. They were an even rarer treat than spotting one of the barn cats outside of feeding time (once a day, my gradma would pour kitty chow onto an old oli-drip pan, and cats would magically appear from all directions), and I remember being utterly enchanted by the bunnies. As I remember, I never managed to get very close to any of them, but I still recall them quite well.

Now as an adult, I work in an environment that is just about as far from the rural tranquility of my grandmother's farm as it is possible to get. Urban, tons of traffic and people, corporate buildings everywhere, computers and gadgets and plastic and glass and steel in a carefully maintained landscape. Just about everything is different...except for the little brown cottontail bunnies proliferating all over campus. I've seen them increasingly often, with two in the last week alone. They placidly go about their bunny business: browsing on the company lawns, dodging cars as they race from one bush to the next, and casually hopping away if you wander a little too close. About the only difference between these bunnies and the ones from my childhood (other than location) is that it seems to me I can get a lot closer to these than I ever did as a kid. Maybe I'm just less threatening than I used to be.

Comments

[fisherbear.livejournal.com]

That, and the ones that are too scared of people to ever leave their burrows never eat.

The apartment complex I mostly grew up in had rabbits all over the place. They particularly liked to nest under transformer boxes. I have no clue why.