River island is hopping with rabbits

Waterfowl hunters who hunker on a Snake River island in hope of decoying ducks or geese are more likely to have a shot at fur than feathers.

Just downstream from Central Ferry, the over-grazed 30-acre New York Island is infested with feral rabbits.

The only island between Lower Granite and Little Goose dams was created after Little Goose was completed in 1970 and began flooding the river valley to create Lake Bryan.

The rabbits have left their mark above and below the ground, with burrows, known as ‘warrens,’ that have interconnecting tunnels and chambers. Top side, the vegetation is ravaged and the ground is littered with droppings and castings, both from the rabbits and from the predators that feed on them.

The rabbits apparently were introduced soon after the island was created because the island was already becoming locally known as “Rabbit Island” by 1973, said Bob Peasley, a retired teacher and coach in Pomeroy.

Agency officials as well as many longtime locals are unclear about the origin of the rabbits.

“I heard a rabbit breeder was going out of business so he let them loose on the island,” Peasley said.

However, Michael Butler, a Corps of Engineers wildlife biologist in Clarkston, said he’d heard that a group of falconers released the rabbits on New York Island so they could hunt them with their hawks.

Les Boyd, a Pullman falconer who’s retired from the faculty at Washington State University, said he’d heard that story, too.

“I heard some falconers brought them over from San Juan Island, but I’ve never heard a name or met anybody who was actually involved with it, and I’m not sure I’d have approved if I did,” he said.

Boyd said he’d heard the rabbits were brought inland from San Juan Island, where it’s been documented that European rabbits were turned loose in the wild around 1900. The rabbits eventually boomed — to the delight of birds of prey and the angst of landscapers — until disease dealt them a serious blow in the 1980s.

“Those rabbits caused a lot of problems for San Juan Island,” Boyd said. “But they’d learned how to survive in the wild, so maybe that explains why somebody decided to bring them to New York Island and how they lived long enough to become established.”

Clearly, however, they are not native rabbits.

“They are feral domestic, not managed wildlife like cottontails,” said Jim Nelson, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife enforcement agent in Pomeroy. “There’s no bag limits or anything on them.”

In other words, the rabbits can be hunted year-round with the exception of the waterfowl nesting season, March 1–June 1, when the Corps of Engineers prohibits access to the island.

In 1992, the Corps of Engineers hired the federal Animal Damage Control to look into exterminating the habitat-damaging exotics, Butler said.

“At that time, they estimated 400-500 rabbits on the island, but they said there was little chance of killing them all and they’d just come back again no matter what we did,” he said.

So the corps has been letting nature take its course. The bunnies, which apparently don’t swim well enough to flee the island, tend to cyclically boom in population and eat themselves into a bust.

Lured by what must be an intoxicating scent, coyotes have been known to swim nearly a third of a mile to the island for what could be a little slice of coyote heaven.

Although hunters report killing the rabbits during daytime occasionally, the number of rabbits is difficult to gauge, since they are largely nocturnal, Butler said. Currently, the population appears to be high because the island vegetation is severely impacted, he said.

“On the other hand, those are the best conditions for goose production,” he added, noting that geese prefer to nest in areas of sparse vegetation and high visibility.

Boyd is still an active falconer, but he doesn’t have a bird, such as a red-tailed hawk, that hunts mammals.

“But I have a Jack Russell terrier,” he said, “and I took her over to the island (not long ago). She about went nuts chasing rabbits and trying to get down their holes. Finally I had to catch her and bring her to the boat before she croaked.

“She slept all the way home and, except for a little dinner, she slept all night.”