It's a Long Road to a Tomato by Keith Stewart

Author:Keith Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2010-07-29T04:00:00+00:00

The driveway rabbits are a resourceful lot, and they soon adapted to the changes thrust upon them. While their numbers may be fewer now, due to the shrinkage of their territory, their population over the last few years has remained viable and remarkably stable. I would guess there are five or six of them living along the north side of the driveway at any one time.

Rabbits are not generally credited with high intelligence. I wonder, though, if they possess some knowledge or instinct that enables them to adjust their numbers as circumstances change—as space and resources become less available, for example. It is widely known how fast they can breed; a female eastern cottontail (which I believe these rabbits to be) can give birth to some twenty bunnies in a single year. If there were nothing to slow them down they might assume the title of “world’s most populous mammal,” which I would guess my own species can currently lay claim to.

Do they breed less when resources are scarce? Do they tolerate only a certain number of their kind on a given patch of land? (Owners of pet rabbits will tell you that two males in a cage together will fight until one or the other is dead.) Perhaps the cold winters curb their numbers, when the ground is covered with snow and food is in short supply. Or is predation the great balancing force? Are the young ones simply driven out of the nest and mostly gobbled up by foxes, coyotes, hawks, and other assorted flesh-eaters? Certainly our cats are happy to oblige in this regard—there’s nothing they like better than to start the day with a breakfast of young rabbit.

Probably all of the above factors, and some others besides, make up the rabbit equation. Whatever the answer, whatever strategies are employed by or against them, there’s little doubt in my mind that the rabbits who live along our driveway have arrived at a state of equilibrium with respect to the resources at their disposal. There’s something deeply pleasing about this.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of rabbits in some other parts of the world. In New Zealand, where I grew up, for example, rabbits are something of a scourge upon the land. Introduced by English settlers in the nineteenth century, rabbits found the mild climate, absence of predators, and abundance of food greatly to their liking. Their habitat expanded as the settlers logged and burned the native forest to create grassy hills for grazing sheep. The rabbit population exploded into the many millions. Soon they were competing with the sheep farmers for grass and, along with the farmers, upsetting the native ecology. As a boy, I spent many a summer afternoon on my Uncle Rodger’s farm hunting rabbits with an old single-shot .22 rifle.

When no one is watching, they nibble off the plants’ first tender leaves.

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