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TRAVELER RETURNS FROM FLORIDA TO DISCOVER RABBIT ZOO
My partner's nullo won the bid in our 500 card game so I sat out the hand. It gave me time to study the silk gloxinia plant sitting to my right on the dining room table in our Orlando, Florida vacation condo. This artificial creation carried realism to the extreme -- it was actually designed with wilted blooms among its bountiful red flowers!
Outside our condo, many of Florida's real flowers were wilted, too, thanks to freezing temperatures in January. During our visit, Florida's air was constantly smoky. A forest muck fire, burning for days, encompassed 4,300 wooded acres west and north of Disneyworld. This part of Florida, the locals informed me, has received five inches of rainfall in the past year. That's dry. Sprinkling bans are in effect. Lawns are brown. Trees are brown. Considering the drought, frost and fire, Florida isn't quite the garden spot this winter that we see pictured on postcards.
A 6-inch carpet of snow and ice on my driveway greeted my wife and me as we arrived back home. I also discovered a rabbit zoo in my yard. Rabbits are everywhere this winter, and are they hungry! This winter's rabbits will eat anything. Several weeks ago, I stood and watched a rabbit devour a wild raspberry cane. Perhaps you know how sharp the thorns are on wild raspberry canes. I still have some imbedded in my fingers from tussles during past growing seasons. So, tell me, how can a rabbit manage to chew raspberry canes like they're tender shoots of asparagus?
As I snapped on cross-country skis and skimmed across ice-crusted snow, I discovered more rabbit mischief. A 3-foot arborvitae had been completely devoured right down to 3/4-inch stems.
I'm not the only gardener with hungry rabbits. A local Master Gardener internet site has featured an ongoing discussion of rabbit travails.
"We've had a surplus of rabbits the last couple of years, and this winter they have chewed the bark around the stems of 17 hardy shrub roses, lilacs, clethra, azaleas, rhododendrons, and many more," wrote a Washington County gardener. "Never in 30 years of gardening have I seen this much damage!"
"Yes, my yard also reflects rabbit damage," reported another gardener. "Rabbit 'paths' are visible from the arborvitae hedge, where they are spending the winter months, to the Nanking Bush cherries where they have chewed off all branches they could reach. Now they're searching out lesser favorites."
The first rule of living with wildlife is to know and understand your adversary, advises Skip Rither, Anoka County Master Gardener. He suggests modifying rabbit habitat by eliminating their cover and removing or restricting access to their food supply.
"Rabbits have a penchant for hanging out in brushy thickets, under decks, under woodpiles, and anywhere there is good cover and a ready food supply," Rither says.
"Rabbit populations tend to be cyclic in nature so some years will have higher populations than others. They are prolific breeders with a possible maximum of six litters per year with six rabbits per litter, although in practice those numbers are seldom reached. Rabbits have a 28-day gestation period and they start breeding again within hours after giving birth. Their expected life span is only 12 to 15 months. They don't live long but they sure know how to make the most of their time."
Control measures include exclusion, repellents, and trapping and removal.
Rither suggests installing chicken wire fencing around your most valuable shrubs. Dig the fence into the soil four to six inches. Place 1/4-inch hardware cloth cylinders around the trunks of small trees. Be sure to anticipate the snow depth or that one foot high fence will be buried under two feet of snow and the rabbits will still be able to browse on the plant. A good rule of thumb is to add the height of the rabbit standing on its hind legs to the anticipated snow depth.
Repellents, Rither points out, are not fences. If the rabbit population is large and the food supply is short, rabbits will eat most any plant despite terrible taste, he says.
Trapping and removal are probably the most effective approach, according to Rither. Of course, any rabbit you trap and relocate may create a problem for someone else.
One final solution: onsider constructing a nesting "cone" for a great horned owl. According to the Bell Museum, rabbits and like-sized mammals compose 50 percent or more of the diet of the great-horned owl throughout its range. The museum offers instructions for building a special 3 ft by 3 ft nest using 1-inch mesh chicken wire.
Of course, great horned owls have also been known to also reduce the number of other small numbers, like cats and small dogs. Don't say I didn't warn you.
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