Idiot bunny

Apparently, rabbits don't hibernate!

Coming home tonight, the car lights fell on another long-eared uninvited visitor in our backyard. Meg kicked me out of the car to chase the bugger away. When I came to the closed-off corner where he disappeared (for some reason I am almost certain it was a male rabbit), he wasn't there. The only place where he could have hidden was under the barbecue, so I banged on it and, of course, the bunny (Meg insists on calling it bunny, I prefer rabbit, for the lack of more derogatory term) made a few lazy hops and stopped, staring at me with one beady reddish eye. It was infuriating, this total lack of fear, not to mention respect. I know, I know—what does a rabbit know about private property? I ran after him, and he made a few more hops in front of the car, which Meg still kept running in the driveway, then turned into the garage and gave me another mocking stare. Now, who's supposed to stare down whom in my own garage?! I came at him with a roar to wake the neighborhood, and he did the basketball dodge—fake to the right, then hop to the left. This time I kicked at him (and missed, for you animal activists reading this), and that finally made him run. But, only until he made it out of the area lit by the garage light. There he stopped in the dark, twitching his ears at me. I don't know if that is equivalent to blowing me a raspberry in bunny-talk?

If you are tired reading for so long about me chasing the rabbit, imagine how tiring it was for me, to sprint at the beast so many times, only to make it hop to the alley. Since we don't have the backyard fenced-off completely, after I finally made the rabbit (lazily) hop away, we figured it'll come back. It seemed that he found the corner behind the barbecue to be an ideal shelter from the wind. We ended up taking the bicycles to the basement to make room for the bbq in the garage. All we need is a coyote to sniff a rabbit and come to our yard for lunch with a family. Yes, we do have coyotes too in the area. We haven't seen any this winter, but last winter we saw them a few times strolling down the snow covered sidewalks. Scary!

None of that would happen if the rabbits hibernated in the winter.