HOW destructive are rabbits, really? Well, it appears they have different tastes in different areas. One holding in which about 1,500 trees and many shrubs have been planted over some 20 years has been little affected. The woman of the house says, however, she has stopped planting pansies. As for small trees, not one casualty. Indeed the only trees marked at all were ash which had reached an age when odd nibbles made little or no difference. No crops other than trees are grown, apart from herbs in pots, which are beyond their reach.
Yet a woman can write an anguished appeal to the English magazine Country Life. She has no grass left on the lawn because of the rabbits. Now it has been replaced by moss "which looks pleasant and green until it is disturbed and dug up by rabbits and badgers alike. And when she wired trees to prevent the rabbits barking them, they jumped on to the lower branches and barked them instead. Up to a height, she writes, of 5 ft 6 inches. Very agile, rabbits. Very adventurous, rabbits. This in Goldeming, Surrey.
One way of keeping their depredations down may be to leave, where possible, large heaps of cut branches and weeds in open spaces. Rabbits make observations when they sit by day, quiet, perhaps digesting their meals. Of course, when these tree-planters mentioned above put down a tender growth like a young sucker from a plum-cherry, it's wisdom to wire it off for a year or so. In the same magazine Richard Plantagenet is very practical. He noted that in a field of corn the three rows of seedlings nearest the hedge were chewed down to stumps. The gun is his answer. He also, by agreement, patrols occasionally the fields of a local vegetable grower. Result: a supply of vegetables, and rabbits in the freezer.
Rabbit is excellent food. In a Dublin restaurant recently, rabbit shredded into morsels under a tent of pasta was quite a new experience. It could have been very tender chicken. And the young look cosy on the lawn, grazing quietly between the blackbirds and the rooks. Well-behaved. Never shot at.