A Rabbit Tale

[Big Magilla]

Thanks for sharing, Sonic. Too bad you don't have the facilities for adopting the rabbits and nurturing them yourself, sounds like you'd enjoy that.

[Sonic Youth]

Good lord, I guess I should've started with the end and held off on so much detail. But for me it was a huge moment in my life. I'll try to finish up as succinctly as I can.

Wednesday was the next day, and the rains were gone for good. I could see from my window the baby bunnies were still sleeping on the box beneath the towel, and not in the nest. It didn't look to me like the mother had come, and I was certain this time they were dead. But again, appearances deceived me. All four bunnies were breathing, and at least one was beginning to stir. (It was a lucky thing they were there at all, and that a predator hadn't come through the fence.) I called the woman at the animal rehab center again. She told me to remove them from the box, which was wet by now, and place them on a fresh towel until they're fully dried. Also, check the body temperatures as I handle them. If they're warm, then the mother did come and feed them. If they're cold, then we have a major concern.

I went back out and noticed that three of the rabbits were awake, stretching and crawling about. But one of them was not. It was lying very still with the eye wide open, still breathing, ocassionally twitching a paw, but not moving at all. Big trouble. It did come to life somewhat when I picked it up, moving its feet gingerly and opening and shutting its mouth. At least the other three squirmed and put up a small fuss. (None of the rabbits liked being picked up. These are wild animals, and they're programmed to feel fear when being handled by a strange creature, no matter how gently. They didn't mind being toweled off, but they hated being picked up.) When they were on the towel, three of them alternated between falling asleep and crawling around. They crawled off the towel and explored a little, but because they're so young they weren't going to get far. But the third baby remained still. And, it was cold. Come to think of it, all four of them were cold. But three of them looked fine and healthy. Maybe it was because they were still wet?

I put in another call to animal rehab, and it took twenty minutes before someone answered. I told her that one of the rabbits needed to be brought in immediately, and described the symptoms. She told me that rabbit was near death, and if all three were cold then they were all going to die. I took down the address of the center, took a shoebox and cut some breathing holes in it as she instructed me to, laid some paper towels on the bottom, put them in and made my way over... a good twenty-five minute ride, listening all the while to the clicking of the claws against the box.

This "wildlife rehabilitation center" sits in the middle of nowhere. It looks like a house converted into a kennel. And the second I stepped inside, I made my decision that I was NOT going to volunteer to work here. I have never smelled anything so pungent, so strong, so unbearable in my life. Caged up off to the side of the building were dozens of animals, including monkeys. Monkeys! These monkeys are purchased by Pennsylvanians as pets - illegally, I'm sure - and then they're not taken raised properly, so the center adopts and cares for them. I saw owls, a falcon, a badly injured turkey, and a Canadian goose with a wing that somehow impacted and punctured through the side of its body, and yet friendly and curious as a puppy, always coming up to the side of the cage to say "hi" (or, more likely, "feed me"). And there were more banal animals... pigeons, squirels, etc.

The owner who I spoke to on the phone looked in the box and immediately took it to the back. She told me one of the rabbits was dead, and a second was nearly dead, but they would try to resuscitate them. They were put in plastic baggies and submerged in warm water, whereupon they stimulated the heart by lightly tapping on the chest with a finger. Both rabbits were revived. All four were going to live. They were out of my hands now. The rehab center was now going to care for them and see to it that they remain healthy until some point in time, once they're adults, when they will be let go into the wild.

Simply put, I saved the lives of four baby rabbits.

I wrote the center a check for fifty dollars, and I'm going to write a nice letter about them in the paper. They function on donations alone, and if they receive a thousand dollars a year I would be very suprised. As for how I feel in general, it's nothing I can describe. I feel different. Sober, I guess is the word for it. I was exhausted afterwards, I spent a day and a half devoted to these tiny animals who were only alive for a week or so, had just opened their eyes, and maybe weren't worth all that fuss and bother, maybe weren't worth ruining two pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes, maybe weren't worth postponing my errands of the day, or risking my own health sitting on the cold mud during a constant drizzle. But nobody needs to ask me if I would do it again.

[Sonic Youth]

Picking up where I left off... I went back to the house and called a local animal hospital, the first number I could find in the phone book. I spoke to a staff member who was an expert on wildlife care and she advised me on what to do.

It was an arduous process. I went out with several small face towels. First, I had to get the babies out of the hole. The hole was very narrow, I didn't know how to pick them up without hurting them, maybe part of them were submerged in the mud etc. I did what I could to make the nest wider by scooping the dirt (which was now mud) away. Then, I sopped up as much of the water I could with a towel so that the water wouldn't rise any further. Another rabbit tried to crawl out of the hole, but fell over on its back onto the two other rabbits and nearly drowned them. Fortunately, week old rabbits barely weigh anything, even to other week-old rabbits. And it was during this process that I discovered a fifth baby I hadn't noticed before, and it was dead. Eventually, with gloved hands, I was able to remove the rabbits that were still alive and place them on the ground. I dried the babies best I could, as delicately as I could, lay them down in a huddle and put a fresh towel over them as a blanket to let them dry and sleep - like baby people, they did a lot of sleeping. I removed and disposed of the dead baby, emptied the hole of all its water, lay yet ANOTHER face towel at the bottom of the hole for absorption (we need to buy another set of towels) and put the bunnies back in the hole. Although a few started crawling around on the ground, once they were back in the nest they recognized where they were and stayed put. This took several hours to do, and it was bitterly cold and drizzly, and I was laying on the very muddy ground during all this time. But I did it. And I rewarded myself with a long, hot shower and a big bowl of soup, as if it were February and not August, however unnaturally cold this August day was.

(It was also during this time that the Jehova's Witnesses decided to come pay a visit to the neighborhood. Oh, well. What was I going to do? I invited them into the back yard to show them what was keeping me busy. They were so astonished, they didn't preach or anything. Hey, I had to show this to someone.)

The worst was over. Right? Well, no. During the four o'clock hour, the rains came back. In the middle of a downpour, I ran outside to see how they were doing. There was some water at the bottom of the hole, so I quickly found a roomy box and lay it over them, leaving enough space for them to breathe. I came back 30 minutes later, and they were sleeping neck deep in water all over again. The water table rose too high. This was all seepage from the ground. And now I had to do the same thing all over again. This time I scooped the water out as fast as I could, which was barely fast enough, removed them and placed them in the box. I scooped all the water out, but the hole filled up within a matter of minutes. So I left them sleeping on the box (it was shallow, like a pizza box) ripped a side off so the mother could find them, and put (another) fresh towel over them, and left them there to sleep. And I sacrificed more hours, more towels, more pairs of pants, etc.

This time I called a local wildlife rehabilitation center. The lady at the animal hospital had given me the number to call just in case. Baby rabbits do not have a scent, so the mother leaves them alone throughout the day in order to not attract attention to them. She visits them only at night to nurse them. My concern was that she would see the box and the towel and then abandon them. But the woman I spoke to at animal rehab said I did everything correctly, and as long as the mother was alive, there was no way it was going to abandon them. Just check on them tomorrow morning and see how they are doing. Chances are, if the water goes down, the mother will put them back in the nest. She then asked me if I wanted to volunteer at the rehab center, because they could use dedicated people like me. I was so scared that during all this work, there was that ONE THING I innocently did that put the babies lives in danger. But after her call, I finally felt relieved.

But THAT'S not anywhere near the end of the story. I woke up the next morning, on Wednesday. And what happened next, I'll get to another time.

[Sonic Youth]

It's generally a bad idea to touch baby critters. Mothers, unless they've grown up around humans and can trust them, may abandon children they think have been tainted by something foul.

That may be true for animals in general. I don't know. But I've since learned that it's a common misconception regarding rabbits. It's not the smell of humans that mother rabbits are averse to. Just aromas that set one rabbit apart from the rest. If you touch one baby, then you have to touch all of them. And anyway, I used gloves.

But I'll get to that a little later...

[OscarGuy]

It's generally a bad idea to touch baby critters. Mothers, unless they've grown up around humans and can trust them, may abandon children they think have been tainted by something foul. However, there are plenty of successful stories about such events hat worked out fine.

Well, I hope the best for you and I'm glad you get to experience nature as you wouldn't normally in the big city. It's one of the best things about living in small towns with nearby natural reserves (All to the south and west is the Mark Twain National Forest here in SWMO). I'm not familiar with Killdeer and I don't know if I've ever seen a goldfinch, but we do have hummingbirds, cardinals, blue jays and other quite colorful birds. My neighborhood's quite populated with Opossums and I've seen lots of rabbits and a few foxes.

Plus, the Nature Center in town, which is just a large series of walking trails through the woods and fields in the southeast of town, has a lot of natural animal populations, including several deer. On multiple occasions (and even in neighborhoods near to it), I've seen several deer (which would normally be shot for sport by the hunters in our area). I've also seen them bound across the road late at night, which helps contribute to the high number of deer-car collisions I've heard about.

[Sonic Youth]

I've had a very tumultuous past few days, and I'd like to share what happened to you.

I live in a newly suburban area in a small town in central Pennsylvania called Duncansville. We're surrounded by forest so there is a lot of wildlife, mostly birds I've never seen before such as killdeer, hummingbirds and beautiful goldfinches. And there are a lot of cottontail rabbits in the area, and a week ago as I was mowing the back yard I discovered a nest of babies. There was a little dry straw covering a small patch of bare ground, and it was moving up and down as if it were breathing. I removed the straw and saw one of the baby rabbits, a hairless newborn, looking more like a sausage-shaped worm. (Something like this.) I covered the hole and left them alone. I don't particularly want rabbits digging holes in my yard, but once the deed is done, then it's my wish for the babies to be healthy and thrive.

For much of the week, central Pennsylvania has had rainfall like I've never seen before. In a single day, we received three inches of rain. All throughout Monday, it was a nonstop torrential downpour. Plus, the temperature dropped to the coolest it had ever been for the month of August in nearly a century. I had forgotten about the rabbit hole until I came home from rehearsal Mon. night (I'm going to be in a play) after driving through this horrid weather in the dark when I remembered the rabbit hole. The mother covers the hole with dried grass and fur, but I didn't think it was going to withstand this weather. I went out to the backyard to find the nest (I had marked it nearby with a stick in the ground), and in the very dim light coming from the neighbors windows, I saw the silhouette of a tiny rabbit lying on the ground. I was convinced the babies were washed out of the hole and I was looking at a corpse.

I was devasted. Last spring, a killdeer made a nest in the gravel by our driveway and laid four eggs there. We waited for the babies to hatch, and became good neighbors. Two weeks later, a predator stole the eggs away and the killdeer never returned. I felt awful back then; I felt even worse now. Plus, in the morning after the rains stopped, I was going to have to find, handle and remove the poor babies from my lawn. My wife is in North Carolina on a business trip. I was all alone. I was NOT looking forward to it.

I woke up Tuesday morning, had a little cereal (actually, I was delaying the inevitable) and went outside thinking about how I was going to go about doing this. Do I bury them? Put them in a garbage bag and dispose of them? I went to the nest, and there was the little bunny, lying on its side slightly curled up. Head to tail, it was slightly smaller than my hand. Three others were in the exposed hole, heads looking up, all very still. Although they are gray Cottontails, they appeared nearly black in color. Meaning, they were drenched. I stood there for a minute thinking about what my next move should be. But little by little... a twitch; a blink; a breath. And then a stretch of a foreleg. The tiny rabbit on the ground was alive. And then again, little by little, one two three... they all survived the rains. Last night, I called my wife, my mother, my father, and told them about the dead rabbits. I was a wreck, as if I lost my own children. But now, I ran back to the house and shot off emails entitled "THE BUNNIES ARE ALIVE!!!!"

I went back with a camera to photograph them. I was to learn later that they were about a week old. They had come a long way from the worm-like creatures they were previously. Now they were covered in fur, and their eyes must have opened very recently. But they were not fully formed. The ears were not ready to stand up yet, their tails were undeveploped, and their limbs were all-but-useless. That the one on the ground managed to climb out was a miracle, because it could barely crawl.

Then I noticed something terribly wrong, something I didn't noticed before. The hole that three of the rabbits were in was full of cold rainwater. They positioned themselves in such a way that they were standing against the walls of the hole so they were upright. They're heads were stretched above the surface of the water, but at the same time they were in this state of torpor, trying to sleep while also trying to reach above the water to breathe. Now what do I do? I should take them out, but how do I do that without hurting them? Am I supposed to touch them at all, or will that put them in greater jeopardy? And once they're out, then what?

You're going to have to wait for part 2 to see how I devoted the next 18 hours trying to save four baby rabbits.