Bog Myrtle & Peat

In reading back through a recent post on grazing, I was mildly surprised to find that I had recorded rabbits as a species which had benefitted from the summer cattle. Rabbits are a very new arrival on the list of conservation concerns, and it’s strange to find that I have begun to consider their habitat requirements.

Twenty years ago, rabbits were absurdly abundant. I could walk out with a rifle in the evening and be sure of coming home with a dozen bunnies. On two back-to-back nights on a neighbouring farm, a friend and I accounted for well over a hundred, and this was hardly extraordinary. Rabbits boomed and every hedge was alive with them. I was sometimes able to catch young rabbits by hand, and I picked up every trick and quirk of ferreting, long-netting and snaring as a teenager. I felt like these would be the tools of my trade, and they came to me in a rich bundle of local folklore and tradition. Rabbits were a cornerstone of this place and it seemed like they always would be.

But in a series of downward turns, that prosperity has crashed into the ground. I’ve worried before on this blog about disease and parasites; the impact of wet weather and mild winters. However you choose to explain their rapid decline, rabbits have gone from large areas of Galloway. When you see them now, it’s only in an echo of their former selves; a couple of dozen shapes nibbling the grass in the sunset. Of course there are still some hotspots, but already it’s hard to recall their numbers as they were.

And now I can begin to understand the confusion and regret of older folk who remember other species in their time of prosperity. They splay their hands and say “it’s a shame that lapwings and curlews have gone”, and that used to make me cross – it seemed to imply such pathetic fatalism – if they really cared, they’d have done something.

But now I have seen abundance collapse into paucity with my own eyes. If you had told me as a teenager that rabbits would soon be vanishingly scarce, I’d have laughed. But it’s damn hard to fight failure like this. I rage and weep, but even I did nothing useful. And there was no safety net; no co-ordinated response; no action plans or remedy – just failure. Rabbits are the latest loss, and if I’ve learnt nothing else from nature in the Twenty First Century, it’s how to grieve and let go.

We’ll mourn those rabbits for a time, then we’ll recalibrate. And then we’ll move on.