A fern-eating rabbit

My gardening companion caught a shot of a rabbit eating a fern recently.

This is a quite unusual sighting; rabbits would normally eat more tender shoots.

But, this one was nibbling vigorously on a fern frond!

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An Eastern cottontail rabbit

WAY down the slope, almost to the bottom of the ravine (below our small house in the mountains), we spotted a grazing rabbit early this evening. The long camera lens gave me a better shot... In perfect rabbit fashion, it proceeded to eat entire stalks of grasses (probably from the winter-strewn hay that my gardening companion had put down for mulch).

As wildlife gardeners, we're happy to see such a large and robust rabbit, obviously a survivor over years; as vegetable gardeners, we hope s/he will stay down on the slope eating grasses!

But it would take a bold rabbit to make it up to the raised beds above the house, the ones full of lettuces.

We'll see! But we had fun watching him/her consume the grasses (through binoculars) this afternoon.

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Eastern Cottontail rabbit habitat

In our garden, currently, 'our' rabbit hangs out here.

the 'front meadow' aka the Piedmont prairie

But all of the young okra seedlings, and a number of squash leaves in the satellite garden disappeared yesterday evening, so I don't know whether to think 'rabbit' or 'young woodchuck.'

Oh, well, we don't much care for okra (it was an experiment) and unless the squash vine borers hurry up (there have been a few casualties already), we'll have more squash than we can eat.

We're fortunate (and I'm grateful) to have plenty of space to spread out herbivore impact.

Probably the mama woodchuck will come up from the woodpile and eat all of the squash vines while we're up in the mountains this weekend and I won't sound so positive!

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Eastern Cottontail rabbit

I have a special fondness for rabbits. Probably if we had more of them, and they were a nuisance in my vegetable garden, I wouldn't think so favorably about them. We live in a small town that's quite suburban in character, really; although we're not in the 'suburbs,' we're not totally rural anymore, either. There's plenty of open space here, but it's increasingly punctated by a mix of houses, pop-up malls, etc.

Rabbits are a scarce commodity around here. I always enjoy spotting one on a morning walk or in our garden.

Growing up, I loved The Story of Peter Rabbit and all of the other Beatrix Potter tales. My mom even gave me a collection of Beatrix Potter stories as a keepsake as a young adult.

So I was delighted to see this large rabbit in the front meadow this morning. S/he was nibbling on grasses, and looks like quite the robust specimen.

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