The following story is not for the faint of heart. . .

Yesterday afternoon,  Kathy and I were out in the front yard with Bobbi and Ellie, watching them but also talking about various facets of the yard  and landscaping- when suddenly Ellie seemed to go a little crazy digging for something, with Bobbi nipping at her heels.  We tried to get her to stop, thinking only that we didn’t want things dug up any more than they already were – when much to our horror, we realized that she had found a nest of newborn baby bunnies and had a wriggling mass of them in her mouth.  We screamed at her to drop them, and as she took off, three of them fell out of her mouth and on to the grass- but one of them was still in her jaws as she took off running.  Try as we might, we couldn’t catch her in time to save the bunny- and in fact, Ellie ate it whole.  We were horrified- it was all but inconceivable that our gentle Ellie would do such a thing- but even the gentlest dog is still a dog and driven by certain instincts.

But the story wasn’t over; not by a long shot.  We circled back to the front yard, because the three newborn bunnies were still in the grass – completely helpless and completely vulnerable.  We are assuming they were newborns because they had no fur whatsoever- and their eyes were still closed. These tiny little things so desperately needed our help, but what to do?  In the end, Kathy stood guard over the rest of the nest while I ran to the garage for a shovel and gloves, whispering a frantic prayer all the while that I would have a steady, gentle hand for this delicate task.  I proceeded to nudge each newborn bunny onto the plastic shovel, and once each one was safely “aboard” I would bring it to the den and ease it back down the hole.   I was as gentle as I could be, but I was so acutely aware of how strange and alien it must have felt for these little creatures to be torn from the soft warmth of their nest and to be lying on a hard, plastic surface like nothing they had felt before.  (I was actually relieved that their eyes were closed, so they were spared the sight of that garish bright orange.) The actually dropping into the hole was a rather rough ride for the poor things, almost as if they’d been forced to drop from their mother’s birth canal a second time.  But as far as we could tell, all three survived – at least for the time being – and now we only allow the dogs out in the yard if one of us is on guard duty, standing right above the nest and ready to sternly shoo away the dogs if they even think about disturbing the newborns.   The scary thing, once the babies were back in the relative safety of their nest, was wondering whether or not the mother rabbit would return.  We haven’t actually seen her back at the nest yet,  but we’ve seen a rabbit hanging around the yard that is probably the mother- – – and we are hoping that this violent assault on the nest hasn’t spooked her into abandoning her brood.  That would break our hearts all over again.

Is it foolish to be broken hearted over something like this? I’m sure someone more rational and reasonable would say that this is nature’s way- that there are already too many rabbits in the world, etc.  But it’s no use. Like it or not, we are really sad and troubled by this; that’s how we feel and we will do our very very best to make sure that this kind of carnage never happens again in our yard.  If it does, there might very well be a Dog For Sale sign in the yard.

pictured:  not the newborn bunnies of this story, but rather baby bunnies in the backyard from a year ago-