Save the rabbit? Save the hostas!

HALLIE EPHRON: Happy Easter!

For me, growing up in Southern California, Easter was all about spring break and bunny rabbits and chocolate eggs and (my favorite) jelly beans. Please, forgive me for my ignorance.

These days, Public Television is running a documentary, surely in honor of Easter, called REMARKABLE RABBITS. It's all about rabbits and hares.

The naturalists go on for some time about the Eastern cottontail, their remarkable mating dance, and how they're endangered and losing habitat in the northeast.

The disappearance of dense shrublands in the Northeast has had a drastic effect on the New England cottontail. To remedy this, biologists at the Roger Williams Park Zoo and the Queens Zoo have raised around 150 New England cottontails over the course of six years through a process called captive breeding. When the cottontails reach a certain age, they are then released back into the wild, where they must learn how to find food and evade predators within the first few hours of life in their new home.

The naturalists interviewed sure sound like they know their stuff, but I invite them to my neighborhood. We have rabbits. Lots of them. Any day of the week. Any time of day. Year 'round. And they leave behind bunny bullets everywhere, not jelly beans.

I can watch them cavorting in my lawn through the blinds in my living room.

Walk four blocks in any direction from my house and despite the lack of "dense shrublands" you WILL spot a rabbit. In all likelihood, you will see many rabbits. 

I hope and pray that those worthy naturalists from the Roger Williams Zoo and Queens Zoo are not breeding them and dropping them off here because I'd like to return to sender.

Because we have plenty of rabbits. What we are lacking are hungry hawks.

Happy Easter! From my curmudgeonly corner or suburbia.

And Please! Any brilliant ideas about how to coexist? I'm stocking up on fox urine to dowse my plants, hoping to discourage them from descimating my perennials.

SAVE THE HOSTAS!