The colored eggs and Peeps and chocolate bunnies have now been put aside for another year (or at least marked down in the stores), but their real-life versions are just beginning to appear. Easter fell relatively early on the calendar this year, and so here, at least, we wouldn’t normally expect to see many of the baby animals normally associated with Spring yet.
The operative word, of course, being “normally.”
Thanks to climate change, our annual visitation by children of the animal world has become less a single event than an ongoing occurrence.
I’ve mentioned its effects on our chickens a number of times: how, despite molting, they also laid eggs all winter long. Reportedly, some of the area tack and feed stores have already had live Peeps (i.e., baby chicks) in stock and available for purchase for at least a couple of weeks.
But the rabbits, those archetypes of Easter?
This year, they’ve been around all winter. Bearing offspring.
The cottontails who appear in today’s photos are from a few years ago, and slightly more age- and calendar-appropriate. Wings took these shots probably eight years ago or so, back when the small three-sided barn was still the hay barn. For some years now, it’s been a chicken coop; the hay barn is a much larger open-sided structure just west of it. But one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s the desirability of hay bales stacked upon wooden pallets as a safe home and shelter for families of rabbits.
There was a fourth photo, one I didn’t include here, because it’s difficult to see anything but parts of bales. But if you look hard enough, you can see tucked in between them a little nose, topped by one tiny pair of eyes peering out nervously. Eventually deciding it was probably safe, the little cottontailed scout emerged into the sunlight.
Of course, as the old joke goes, there’s never just one rabbit.
And soon a sibling emerged to join the scout.
They sat there, blinking in the morning light, sunning themselves in its warmth, but not straying too far from the entries to the shelter beneath the bale-loaded pallets, lest they suddenly need its safety again.
Eventually, a third member of the clan summoned up the courage to venture out into the light.
He was a little more timid, inquisitive like the others, but not quite willing to come fully into the open. He seemed content to leave his tail covered by the bales, and to peer out from behind the extra barrier of the weathered wooden ladder.
This year, the youngsters have emerged only one at a time, but when they do, they seem a bit braver than their predecessors. Of course, it might be necessity: After all, the parents have been ranging much farther and wider than normal, showing themselves not only at dawn and dusk, but throughout the day as they forage. They now venture regularly into the horses’ pens, even while we’re out there, something they never used to do.
It seems counterintuitive — after all, one would think that warmer weather earlier would lead to a better food supply for the little vegetarians — but it makes me think that climate change has diminished their natural food supply. Encroachment and increased predation are the most likely direct causes, but it’s all no doubt rooted in environmental changes to their natural habitat.
Of course, their mythical cousin, the Easter Bunny, is known for a reverse dynamic:Rather than foraging for food, he brings it to others in the form of brightly colored eggs. His existence and identity are reportedly rooted on centuries-old German Lutheranism; his ancestor was the Easter Hare, which is not quite the same thing as a soft and cuddly cottontail. Of course, the association of rabbits with the Easter season goes back much further (in Christianity, at least to the first few centuries of the common era; in Paganism, much further back yet), with the rabbit’s connotations of fertility and birth an obvious metaphor for renewal and growth. But the modern icon was less overtly linked with such sexualized notions of fertility. Indeed the Easter Hare himself was not especially cuddly, either; he was a disciplinarian, one who distinguished between good and bad children and rewarded only those found acceptably good with his colored eggs.
In our cultures, there are other rites of Spring that have nothing to do with Easter imagery, whether Christian or Pagan in origin. As a practical matter, of course, lots of people within our many traditions do celebrate Easter form a religious standpoint, and even among those who don’t, their children still often color, hide, and hunt eggs, eat Peeps and chocolate bunnies, and don colorful new clothing to attend to church.
For us, though, the day and the season are less about what the cottontails and their feathered cousins bring to us than it is about providing a safe and habitable space for them, as free of the deprivations of encroachment and climate change as possible. And so the cottontails are given safe haven beneath the bales, protected from predation, allowed to grow and breed and birth anew.
And once in a while, they reward us by bringing us something that money can’t buy, its own gift of Spring: enough trust to sit in the sun in our presence, to allow Wings to capture and preserve their image for future seasons.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
