Divine Bunny Intervention?

A strange series of events seems to have taken place to save the life of a single rabbit. My mind wants to connect it all to something cosmic or religious. The circle of life? Nature winning out? I don’t know. Remember that episode of the Simpsons that had a segment about Marge killing a fly and it changes the future? This bunny’s story has me thinking about the ripple effect of one small event and wondering if I just witnessed a world-changing event.

A little background. I moved into a new-construction home and I’m in the midst of the whole driveway and lawn installation process. The driveway needed to be done before landscaping, and that was delayed by a couple of weeks due to more than a week of daily downpours. That pushed back landscaping, naturally. Then the landscaper’s equipment broke down and he lost a week waiting for repairs. Somewhere in there, a rabbit decided that my barren lot made the perfect spot for her to build her nest. She did so just outside my living room window. A moral dilemma for me, not wanting rabbits to eat my flowers when I finally could plant them, but not wanting the fuzzy little creatures to be squished when landscaping started. I crossed my fingers and hoped the kits would be old enough to scamper out of the nest when the backhoe finally arrived.

Landscaping work was supposed to start yesterday, and the nest was still occupied. The morning spooled out with no landscape crew arriving. Finally, an hour after work was to start, they texted me to say that Diggers’ Hotline had failed to mark one of the utilities and work would be delayed by another day. Having inherited my father’s lack of patience (he once threw a hammer halfway across the yard), I was naturally frustrated, but what are you going to do? I also didn’t want to be a headline if the work crew hit the gas line and blew up half the block. OK. Deep breath. What difference would one more day make?

Last night, as I was sitting down to watch the evening news, I saw a huge crow swoop down to the rabbit nest. By the time I got to the window for a closer look, the crow had flown away and the nest was torn apart. There were tufts of fur and dry grass scattered all around where the nest lay gaping open. I know crows eat pretty much anything, including small mammals. I don’t know how many kits were originally in the litter, but I suspect the crow made off with one or more of them. Trembling there in the open hole was one solitary baby bunny. I was torn between covering up the nest and taking in the sole survivor and raising it. I decided the best course of action was to leave it be. Mother rabbits relocate surviving babies after a nest raid, right? I hoped so.

This morning, with landscaping crew arrival looming, I went out to check the nest. It had been carefully reconstructed, so I knew the mother rabbit had been there. My heart in my throat, I grabbed a nearby stick and carefully pulled back the fur and grass nest cover to get a peek. Empty! The nest was empty. The kit had been relocated by its mother. Relief! Nature had won out.

Without the delays, the nest and its occupants would have been destroyed. The biggest player in the kit’s survival was that final one-day landscaping delay and the crow arriving in that day to disturb the nest, causing Momma Bunny to move her single child to safety. Sure, lives were probably lost, but one life was saved. Cause and effect or divine intervention? I don’t know, but I expect big things from that surviving little bunny.