Saving the Easter bunny of the Brecks

In a corner of East Anglia, a £4.6 million project is on a mission to rescue a rather unique rabbit, says n a lazy afternoon in the Brecklands, rabbits scuttle out of their warrens and dart about in the crisp spring sunshine. As they stretch out to soak up the rays or munch the nearest patch of grass, they keep one eye open and listen out with ears erect, like soldiers on parade.

The Breckland rabbit is distinct from our native species – chocolate versions of which many of us will be sinking our teeth into today. This particular bunny is more compact and has thick fur to protect it against the cold winters of the Brecks – a 250-acre stretch of ancient heathland on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, which has its own microclimate and is famed for warm summers and hard frosts.

It may sound strange to some who regard the rabbit as pestilent gnawer of cabbage beds and uprooter of trees, but great responsibility rests on these tiny twitching haunches and white bobtails.

This is a sparse landscape and one that has been shaped by rabbits. After they were introduced by the Romans – and increased under the Normans – an unseen spaghetti junction of warrens snakes through the poor sandy soil.

For centuries, the residents of these warrens were used to provide fur and meat to clothe and feed Britain’s burgeoning population. By the mid 19th century, “warrening”, as this cottage industry was known, was at its peak, with tens of thousands of rabbits dispatched to London every week.

OBy the Second World War, however, the little mammals had lost their value and were then devastated by the 1953 myxomatosis outbreak, which wiped out 99 per cent of Britain’s rabbit population within a year. The warrens of the Brecks began to empty, and a rare and vital ecosystem of plants, birds and insects, which depended on the rabbit for survival, started to wither and die. Now, Natural England has chosen saving the rabbits of the Brecks as a key goal of its new £4.6 million Back From The Brink project, which aims to rescue some 200 of the country’s rarest flora and fauna from extinction.

The scheme follows a report last year warning that one in 10 UK wild species are threatened with extinction, with the numbers of our most endangered breeds having plummeted by two thirds since the Seventies.

Back From The Brink will focus on seven main areas, including the Brecks. It is the first coordinated countrywide initiative to safeguard against extinction, and involves landowners and charities across Britain.

“Lots are iconic species that people in these areas recognised as special and unique to them,” says Karen Kramer Wilson of Natural England, as we stride out over the Brecks, flushing Rabbit warrens are home to complex societies we are just starting to understand, says Karen Kramer Wilson, above with Mark Blissett out skylarks as we go. “All are predicted to go extinct within the next few years.”

The Breckland rabbit is deemed so vital because of the work it does in chomping the grass and turning over the sandy soil. As a result, rare and wonderfully named flowers and plants have sprung up, some of which are unique to this part of the country.

There are perennial knawels, starry breck lichen, Spanish catchfly and rare spring sedge. These, in turn, provide nourishment for insects such as the grey carpet moth and five banded tailed digger wasp. The heathland also sustains adders and common lizards, nightjar, stone curlew and woodlark.

“What a lot of these things have in common is the need for open, bare ground,” says Kramer Wilson. “That’s where the rabbits come in. In the same way that pollinators provide a service for crops and wildflowers, rabbits are doing the same thing for invertebrates and rare plants.”

We are walking over a heath called East Wretham, one of the better places these days to spot Breckland rabbits but still an area that has seen a steady decline. On nearby Weeting Heath, there has been a 79 per cent fall in rabbit numbers over the past 20 years. In 2001, 1,100 rabbits were counted by a summer warden. Last year it was 20.

Myxomatosis remains a threat. So too does a virus called rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD), which first spread through Britain in 1992 after originating from the domestic rabbit and has, in the past year, mutated into a deadly new strain.

Unlike the cruel effects of myxomatosis, where infected rabbits stagger round blind and in a zombified state, the impact of RHD is largely unknown, as the rabbits die in their