Another Life: Reflections on one sad rabbit

There are self-reliant rabbits, even outside the annals of Watership Down. One, all alone and from nowhere, has appeared from beneath the dark branches of our prostrate yew to graze what used to be a lawn. Six rabbits, by some accounts, will eat as much as one sheep does, but having recently watched three ewes (explorers from under the bridge) make hungry assaults on the grass, I think it might take 60. Anything to save mowing.

A lone rabbit certainly looks odd, even rather sad. It could, apparently, be what’s known as a satellite male – an old one driven out from the group by bullying young ones, or a widely wandering first-year male who has yet to find a home. While his colony, down on the duach along the shore, have sandy burrows to sleep in, he lives on the surface and, for the moment, in the shadows of the yew.

No cause for panic

Now that my vegetable-growing is confined to the polytunnel, the sight of a rabbit on the acre is no longer a cause for panic. It’s only a year or two, however, since a lone but presumably pregnant doe was exploring the tunnel: I found her digging trial burrows in the soft raised beds. The whirlwind of her eviction left a storm track through the carrots.

At least I no longer see rabbits as personal prey. Among early equipment for our western settlement was a brand-new shotgun from Westport: a weapon from the former East Germany, handsomely blued and with a walnut stock. I had never fired one before but had a book on how to, as on everything else “self-sufficient”. In the relative safety of the empty strand I discovered both my incapable marksmanship and a dread of such a loud bang next to my ear. Besides which, as I was to realise, no one shoots rabbits with a shotgun.

So, on to snaring. The shore’s rabbits had not been seriously snared since the war, and although some basic technology survived in the community – braiding of wire, an eyelet from an old shoe to make the noose run smoothly, and so on – the fieldcraft of actually setting snares proved more elusive. An early confessional column, headed “An amateur cad”, brought me nostalgic tips from this newspaper’s urbanised readers.

“Swiss Family Robinson”

Setting a score of pegs and nooses among the marram grass at dusk, with the surf rolling in and the wild birds calling, could seem all very

Swiss Family Robinson

. But they have to be revisited at dawn, before too many ravens and foxes arrive, and often when wind and rain are lashing the dunes and the rabbits have stayed below, recycling their half-digested droppings in a second chew (a process termed “refection”). Too many futile journeys or – far worse – the odd victim, still alive and struggling, prompted proper and permanent reform.

Besides which there came a new wave of myxomatosis. It left the machair dotted with immobilised victims, hunched and miserable, bright eyes closed by grotesquely puffed lids. This hideous and fatal, contagious plague, borrowed from Australia and the UK in the 1950s, was introduced as a pest control on a widely irregular basis. Successive Irish outbreaks have produced resistant rabbits and increasingly disease-free generations, but the virus, as some geneticists speculate, may yet evolve a counter-mutation.

The native home of the rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is the western Mediterranean, so the animals brought in for food by Norman settlement still needed careful rearing in artificial warrens, well protected from predators and preferably on islands. The earliest references to rabbits in Britain or Ireland are to warrens on Lambay Island, off Co Dublin, in 1191 and in Connacht in 1204.

Rabbits rapidly acclimatised and went feral, and their value for meat and furs made them widely welcome. In pre-Famine Ireland they were often “planted” in coastal dune systems, sometimes to dire effect. The burrows brought spectacular erosion in winter storms, and dunes collapsed, blown sand burying whole villages, as at Rosapenna, in Co Donegal. This, in turn, brought landowner planting of marram, or “bent”, in attempts at dune repair, the first at Mullaghmore, Co Sligo, in 1822.

With three to seven litters a year, rabbit populations can be hard to count. As advised by the ecologists Tom Hayden and Rory Harrington in Exploring Irish Mammals (Town House, 2000): "It may be necessary to walk along a predetermined route and count rabbits feeding in the evening at least 20 times before a reliable average figure can be calculated."

This “medium impact invasive species”, as it’s officially designated, is prey for many others, some of which we like – stoat, fox, badger, pine marten, hen harrier, golden eagle – and one we don’t: the feral mink. Ireland’s wildlife is a limited and tenuous network, much of it imported, in which the rabbit has an indispensable place.

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks