Home Again, Home Again, Jiggidy Jig

All right, all right. I will tell the story of the bunnies. You can quit begging. There's only so much of that a person can stand.

I thought about naming this "True Confessions" but I thought I might get a bunch of hits looking for something a little wilder than a bunny tale. The confession will come later. First of all I'll tell you about the baby.

We have "wild" bunnies in our yard. They are loose and fend for themselves. For about 20 years they mostly stayed over in our next door neighbors yard, but for some reason about a month ago a couple of them moved into our front yard.

Last night Mike was mowing the lawn, his favorite past-time since all it involves is sitting and driving. Not too much manual labor involved. All of a sudden he started hollering and yelling. We were all in the house and couldn't understand a thing he was saying, but his tone of voice was very excited and urgent. Of course Oscar picked up on that and began to frantically run around the house barking and pawing at the doors. Finally I understood what Mike was yelling.

"Don't let Oscar out! Whatever you do, don't let Oscar out!!!"
I almost opened the door to ask Mike what he was yelling about, and Oscar surely would have escaped. It's a good thing I went to our big picture window and asked him through the screen instead.

Mike then told us there was a tiny little bunny under Andy's car. After a little while we saw it hop out onto the lawn, keeping close to it's mother. It was so tiny I thought it was just a little bunch of grass where the lawnmower had dropped some. The other rabbits are monster sized. They live the good life feasting on 5 acres of grass.

This morning I really wanted to see the baby up close. I walked around very quietly. I saw the hole which the adults had built a few weeks ago, but no luck with spotting the baby.



I told the girls that if they saw it while I was at work they were to get some pictures with my camera. Sure enough, as soon as I left a baby bunny came out and feasted. Abby got some good close shots of it. It was a different one than I had seen the night before. This one was brown. Last night's baby was grey with spots.



Tonight I thought it might come out again. I took a lawn chair, my camera, a bottle of water, and my sketchbook out to sit quietly and wait. There was one adult munching happily on the grass, not too concerned about the lady in the chair.



I spent some time sketching it as it moved around, changing positions and keeping a watchful eye out for any danger.



Mike saw me out there and brought Oscar out on a leash to keep me company. That was not exactly what I wanted as I knew the mother would never bring out her tiny baby with this excited canine lurking about. But it was still relaxing sitting out in the shade, sketching. I sketched some of Oscar, who never took his eyes off the big bunny 30 feet away.

I never did see the baby. I'm hopeful that I'll get a glimpse and some more pictures tomorrow.

Now for the confession.

The bunnies were originally ours. We got them for our kids for Easter,when they were little, about 20 years ago. The kids kept forgetting to lock the cages and the 2 bunnies kept escaping. I got so tired of catching the dang things and locking them back up that I just let them stay free. They moved to the neighbors back yard and thrived. We never told the neighbors where they came from. They are very protective of them and consider them almost like pets. I can't really see the need to tell them of our part in their origins.

So, I can't really complain when some of our pet's great-great-great-great.............. (well, you get the picture) grandkids, come back to their roots.