By leaps and bounds, rabbit presence grows

Here’s a math question you won’t find on college entrance exams: When does one plus one equal eight, or two plus two equal 14?

The answer, as Shawna Carlson of Spokane Valley knows all too well, is when your neighborhood is bursting with bunnies.

“They’re domestic,” Carlson said. “They were ours. We had two. We took them out of their pen three years ago to clean up their cage. They got loose and started multiplying.”

Soon, Carlson was chasing after rabbits with a laundry basket trying to round them up and, by her own admission, looking pretty foolish in the process. She paid neighborhood children $5 a rabbit for retrieving the critters, but she stopped after discovering the kids were profiting from a covert catch-and-release program.

She finally rounded up what she thinks are most of the bunnies, 14 in all, shipping them to an uncle’s house in Green Bluff. But there was one Sasquatch of a bunny in her neighbor’s yard Tuesday, a 10-pounder just waiting for some multiplication.

The rabbit population seems to be up this year. The Centennial Trail is jumping with cottontailed critters. A dozen or so rabbits graze on the lawn of the state line rest area on Interstate 90. The word is long ears are also en vogue on the Newman Lake peninsula.

But rabbits are also a species no one really monitors, though even the Fish and Wildlife Department says they’ve had bunnies chewing down the shrubbery at their newly landscaped, newly constructed Spokane Valley office building in Mirabeau Park. Anecdotes submitted by Spokesman-Review readers over the past five days, more than 50 mostly from Spokane Valley, indicated the area is hopping this summer.

“I expect the cottontail critters will soon outnumber the number of residents that live here,” said Priscilla Schoessler of her Northwood neighborhood. “The neighbor down below us lost all of her newly planted pansies, and whenever the neighbors are ‘talking across the fence,’ the rabbits always come up.”

And in Morningside subdivision, six miles southeast of Schoessler’s home, Christine Celstino is losing her appreciation for posy stems. It would be nice, she said, if the bunnies would leave her at least a few flowers.

More frustrating is that the rabbits have passed up the Spokane Valley woman’s salad-lined traps and disarmed her more than once with their good looks. Mothballs, some gardeners say, scattered in a flowerbed will keep rabbits at bay at least until the balls melt.

As for baiting bunnies, you’d have better luck catching rabbits with a cheeseburger than a handful of lettuce and a box trap, say pest controllers specializing in large animals.

“Rabbits are hard to catch,” said Bill Haywood, of Sound Varmint Control. “There’s so much to eat out there. It all looks better than a slice of apple or some wilted lettuce in a cage.”

Haywood has concerns, too, about homeowners putting out their own rabbit traps. Washington law requires a nuisance wildlife trapping license for people setting traps. The law is intended to prevent them from being improperly relocated, thereby causing problems elsewhere.

Homeowners can get by without a license, but only if the animal is released somewhere else on the homeowner’s property or killed and thrown away properly. There are also hunting restrictions on cottontails, which haven’t been OK to shoot since March 15.

“Everybody has an old guy with a trap in their neighborhood who will catch an animal and let it go out in the country,” Haywood said. “But that guy’s truck doesn’t hold enough gas to get him beyond all the people. And it’s cruel to take an animal out and dump him somewhere.”

Many cases of feral rabbits stem from someone dumping their pets, said Matt Houston, of Skunkworks Nuisance Animal Management. Houston doesn’t think there’s been a surge in the rabbit population. Rather, there are isolated cases of increased rabbit populations traceable to things like abandonment or neighbors offering the critters a free meal.

A couple years ago, Houston was hired by the Washington Transportation Department to de-rabbit the weigh station and rest stop near the Idaho state line.

Houston pulled 30 rabbits from the area, mostly of the larger, more colorful domestic variety. Apparently, someone released their pet at the rest stop and the problem quickly got out of hand.

When he can, Houston takes his formerly domestic captives to a vet for inspection, and then gives them to a feed store for resale.

The rest stop rabbits are now on the rebound. Six Pomeranian-sized bunnies with gray or brown coats stretched out on the lawn this week. Soon they’ll be headed to the briar patch, though. Spokane County plans to open a 3-acre dog park on the site by early fall.