WANTED: RABBIT RANGLER

Sometimes you think you’ve seen it all in your garden. This is our 15th summer in our house so I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on the comings and goings in our yard. But this year I’ve been presented with an issue I’ve not faced before.

Rabbits. Many, many rabbits. Last night I identified them in five sizes: X-small (teeny, tiny, just barely hopping cuties) through X-large (rather worse for the wear moms, or so I’m thinking). I did this within five minutes, because that’s how much time passed before I saw all sizes and more than 10 of them. This, folks, is a problem.

The X-Large, Large and Medium sizes of rabbits currently residing in my yard enjoying an evening nibble near the bird feeder.

While we’ve had the occasional rabbit, especially several years ago when I’d find the occasional nest, it has been at least five years since I’ve seen a single rabbit in our yard. We’ve had a very healthy fox population in our neighborhood, not to mention hawks, owls, coyotes and more, that I assume took care of the issue.

Mr. Much More Patient saw a fox the other morning but that’s the first sighting of the year and the neighbor reported they found a dead fox on their property last week. This not good.

Whatever the reason, the rabbits are a concern. I’ve been able to minimize the damage by being vigilant with deer/rabbit spray, but I know this is a system that is bound to fail. At some point they’ll either stop caring about the spray or I’ll forget to reapply to new growth or wait too long after a heavy rain to spray again.

The enormous hairy dog who sheds liberally around the yard, pees even more liberally and chases and barks at a lot of critters seems to have zero effect on the rabbit population. I’ve not been able to find where they are nesting or hiding, but every time I turn around another one seems to be hiding under a hosta. Last night three micro-bunnies shot out from under a ‘June’ hosta at a blistering pace but I lost them when they hid under a globe spruce.

So as much as I hate these critters, and as much as I wish some predator would come along and solve my problem for me, I can’t personally hurt them. I realize that is a little ridiculous and comes down to semantics, but I can’t personally harm them. So does anyone have any suggestions for me on how to get rid of this rabbit issue without a fence, BB gun or a rent-a-fox?

I’m all ears.