The oddest of things
There are rabbits.
In the trees. Or at least there have been.
It’s been an interesting year so far.
(Disclaimer: this column is not a metaphor for U.S. politics, global pandemics, changing climate and intensifying weather events, or even new threats to democracy. It’s about rabbits. In trees.)
There are plenty of signs that it’s been hard winter on the Avalon: destroyed curbs, numerous patches of spilled hydraulic fluid from heavy equipment breakdowns, whole thickets of pines, spruce and fir that have had their tops broken off by piled snow. Other trees have their lower branches pulled down and broken off by heavy, settling ice and snow banks, branches sometimes as thick around as my wrist or larger, an unintentional and ragged form of pruning.
The heavy snow in January stayed, hardened, thickened, iced up and took a toll, snapping off young trees completely and wounding even large, long-standing ones.
But of all the damage, once you see it, what’s been done by the rabbits in the trees is the most startling. Deep, heavy, impenetrable drifts covered large areas of the Avalon, keeping rabbits away from some of their regular food sources on the ground.
Unable to find those, they took to what they could reach on top of the snow. And that was trees.
Not just any trees. More than anything else, the rabbits have been in the apple trees. In the crab apples, the ditch apples, the old orchards and even in my particular favourites, the ragged, stubborn bad-hair-day solo trees that still defiantly produce a hefty crop of scabby uneven apples every fall.
Probably, they won’t do as well this year. A fair number won’t survive.
I noticed it first in my Conception Bay North apple trees. They’re an interesting pair, one started decades ago with a tossed apple core (bad-hair-day variety), the other a greenhouse sapling purebred that has mysteriously never found a way to do anything but grow straight up. Both were hit hard: the newer tree lost its entire top 18 inches. Old faithful — usually 10 to 25 apples a year, hard, sweet and strongly perfumed — lost probably 60 per cent of its crown branches.
Not just a tree-bottom girdling, the bark gnawed off all around the base of the trunk, but far more startling. Whole branches, sometimes even the truck, stripped completely of bark. Every bud-tip nipped off with the familiar clip marks of sharp little bunny teeth.
At first, in other parts of the Avalon, I didn’t see the same kind of damage. But sometimes, your eyes take a turn, see a shape or a kind of contrast, and then you can’t help but see it every time it repeats. Like the curious clenched branches and dark stubby dead-head twigs of Damson plum trees — their shape catches in the corner of my eye, and I know I’m near the foundation of an old house.
But back to the apples. Damage in some trees — I measured — as much as nine and a half feet off the ground, and extending over yards and yards of branches. Once you start to see it, though, the damage is everywhere the snow was.
And it’s not just the apple trees: there’s similar, but less thorough, damage to pin cherry trees, to prickly-pears or Saskatoons. Even on mountain ash or dogwood, which, if you’ve ever cut one up, would make a remarkably pungent rabbit snack. But the apple trees must be tastier or more nutritious, because where they are, they’ve taken the brunt of it — especially if they’re wild, solitary, and tucked into a dell that catches and holds more snow than open ground does.
Do I know absolutely for certain it’s rabbits? Yes, I’m pretty sure — they do have a record of doing exactly this kind of damage in other places. Then there’s the carpet of rabbit droppings directly under the trees, and, in some spots where conifers and deciduous trees cohabitate on the edges of fields, there are even sprays of rabbit pellets on top of low-lying spruce branches under the bare gnawed wood of the hardwoods standing above them.
I’ve been making my way around the Avalon Peninsula for more than 30 years, along old dirt roads, crossing grown-over backyard pasture and gardens behind collapsed or removed homes — but this? It’s a new one for me.
Rabbits in the trees. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.