A Rabbit A Day Keeps The Apple Away

This won't interest most of you--just a nature story.

We have a wild rabbit that lives in our yard. Our yard is somewhat of a safe haven for such since it is fenced in and always has a supply of water, shelter and shrubbery for hiding. We don't plant veg gardens so we don't mind the company.

The way rabbits multiply it would seem we would have a yard full of them but no, it is always only one, sometimes on rare occasions, two.

One will show up as a young bunny about 3-4", act mostly tame, stay in our yard for most of a year till grown, then vanish only for the process to repeat over and over. I assume the rare 2nd rabbit is a previous tenant that has come back for a visit or maybe water.

Part of my wife's "healthy" diet is an apple a day. She was tossing the apple peelings in the trash and I suggested we put them outside for rabbit food.

Anyway, to make this story a little shorter, the rabbit eats all the apple peelings every night, loves sliced banana and eats the dry rabbit food I put out for him/her/it.

Rabbits in the wild eat tree bark, twigs, clover and such. In the past I've seen them eating fallen dates from our palm trees and pears so I suspected they had a sweet tooth. My kids had pet domestic rabbits long ago but we didn't know to give them fruit.

deer here get the toss outs,
watermelon rind, cantalope rinds, apple pealings and core,

all gone overnight,

we have bunny's but rarely see more than a few,
the neighborhood cats will get some babies, and if they get bigger, the cats ignore them,

I have a wild grape growing in a tree by my shed, the deer come out several times a day looking for the ones that drop

I have Deer, Racoons which I feed, and squirrels.
The Deer stare at me, but if I don't move they don't see me.
Baby Squirrels are incredibly fast.
I never see the Coons

A lot of wild creatures eat at night due to predators.

Rabbits sleep 6-8 hours a day and probably during the day time. They have an extra set of transparent eyelids where they can sleep with their eyes open and easily be startled if they sense danger.

Why are we born people and Ants born Ants ?
Maybe I'll be a Rabbit in my next life.
Hopefully not a Termite - wood doesn't sound very appetising.

https://i.imgur.com/vX7RETt.jpg

These are hybrids of the wild river valley cotton tails and somebody's pet Dutch bunnies. This is a common sight out our back door, with the occasional railway jack rabbit showing up. This one is sleeping with it's eyes open as alluded to above. The D-810's very quiet shutter "woke" it up, and it hopped off for parts un-known. There's also trash pandas around here too, so we don't set anything out. These rabbits do not color phase for winter, so there's probably a lot of loss of them to predation.

Regards,

Doc Sharptail

My sister buys 5# bags of carrots and feeds the Desert cottontails in the yard. There's a 10 acre empty lot next door. She just lost her 22 YO Australian Silky dog last year so I'm not going to say anything about that, and she assures me that If I want to shoot a few for fried snacks that would be OK and she'd join us for dinner if I did. I've seen as many as 20 in the yard at a time (sunrise and sunset).
Then, for a change of subject, about 2 years ago a Salcotta tortoise wandered through the yard and set up housekeeping under a pile of yard junk so now, it gets the vegetable scraps that we used to throw over the fence (remember the lot next door?) to the javalinas that pass through regularly. Then, there's quail, bobcats and coyotes and occasional vulture. The Tortoise has gotten to be over 12 long, 15# and eating us out of house and home!
Us humans live on 1 acre lots around here, so anything louder than a 22lr would be considered rude at least unless there was an agreed upon pest problem.
Ben Avery Shooting Facility is 15 minutes away so no real reason to shoot up the neighborhood for practice.
Incidentally, the Salcatta is an African tortoise that looks "sorta" like the endangered Sonoran tortoise so It's supposedly a popular exotic pet here but no one responded to our announcement offering to return our find.

We had some cherry trees in our backyard, one day I looked out and saw a deer picking up the falls off the ground, then I looked up and saw a bear in the tree having a snack too. Just like people some do all the work and others take advantage of that.