Where are all the rabbits?

A grief, and some excellent rabbit poems

Out walking earlier this year my friend remarked on the lack of rabbits.

I hadn’t noticed, and I didn’t think much of it; we weren’t too far from Manchester and although I haven’t seen many in the six years I’ve been living here I also wouldn’t expect to see many wild rabbits in and around a city…

So I shrugged it off; they’d be around, out in the countryside proper…

But then the other day, walking in an entirely different and much more rural part of the country with Mum and keenly looking out for birds, butterflies, and other creatures (we saw swallows, wagtails, sparrows, blue tits, robins, a buzzard, a larger bird we think was a hen harrier, a green woodpecker, a great spotted woodpecker, several butterflies, and a few other small birds not glimpsed long enough to identify, as well as soooo many blackthorns heavy with fat blue-black sloes) we realised we’d been tramping through all these fields for hours but hadn’t seen a single rabbit…

Even just ten years ago rabbits were common: …