Rabbits’ instincts remain a mystery

THESE DAYS the rabbits seen from our first floor windows hop about in a field of head-high buttercups. Every evening, about eight o’clock, a fox passes at the top of the field.

A stoat lives under the trees across the stream from our garden. It ambushes baby rabbits. We found one still alive, with the characteristic bite-marks at the back of the neck, but it was beyond saving.

Stoats will hunt down rabbits twice their size. Now, in summer breeding colours, this stoat is lovely to behold when glimpsed in the dappled light beneath the trees. It is almost as red as the fox, with a creamy white belly and a vivid black tip on its tail.

The rabbit-field is often grazed by horses from a local riding stable.

The rabbits chomp the meadow flowers, or bask in the sun, unconcerned. How do rabbits know horses won’t eat them? They know humans are a threat, and hop off the minute one appears. Is it learned behaviour, passed down over aeons? The earliest rabbit skeletons found are 55 million years old.

What of rabbits who have no contact with humans for generations as, for example, populations on uninhabited islands in West Cork’s Roaring Water Bay? How did they get there to begin with? Did they swim? Or were they there when the islands, millennia since, were joined to the mainland? If a cow steps ashore, do the rabbits run for their lives? Probably not. What if a fox arrives? Or a human? Can herbivores smell carnivores? When we make a landfall, do they sniff the air and think to themselves, those two-legged items have the smell of meat-eaters about them? Do they stamp their little feet to say let’s “take a powder and dissolve!”, as girls used to when we boys approached them in the 1950s? But now, leaving aside, for a minute, the riveting investigation of rabbits’ minds, I must record a useful insight that came my way last week.

I was walking uphill at the time.

What is reality, what is illusion? I asked myself, in the spirit of Plato or Aristotle. For example, put a spirit level on this incline and it is clear that it is an incline. However, as I walk up it, if I keep my head down and look only at the ground immediately ahead of my feet, I can see it as flat, not sloping, and then it becomes as easy to ascend as it would be to walk down a bowling alley.

The friend walking with me sees the slope for what it really is, and grunts and gasps as he struggles up it. The mind can distort usefully at times and contemplating the behaviour of rabbits is a great distraction.

A lovely book arrived on my desk, sumptuous to look at and abounding with information on artefacts as old as time and literally on our doorstep.

It is Stones of Adoration, Sacred Stones and Mystic Megaliths of Ireland by Christine Zuchelli, published by The Collins Press and supported by The Heritage Council.

When Ms Zuchelli visited Ireland in the 1980s she was captivated by the wealth of our heritage. After graduating, she travelled the country researching the myths, legends and folklore behind the veneration of particular stones. Our landscape is replete with them, from burial sites on the route of the controversial M3 motorway, to ogham stones and monoliths, tombs of Irish kings and Viking warriors, stones sacred to women of the underworld, and sheelagh-na-gigs.

Many are beautifully decorated, and they are often sited in dramatic landscapes, worth visiting for themselves. Armed with Ms Zuchelli’s accounts of their significance and story, they would make fine venues for summer outings, or pilgrimages. There are certain to be lapidary and enduring examples of our prehistory near you.

While it is a bit late in the year, I must congratulate The Central Fisheries board on its 2007 calendar illustrating, month by month, non-native invasive species which threaten our flora and fauna. Hopefully, those who see it will, even without reading the excellent descriptions of habitat and specific threat on the back cover, take action when they see them locally. Japanese knotweed, Himalayan Balsam, the Chinese mitten crab and zebra mussels are examples.

Another government-funded publication I turn to is the beautiful Irish Hedgerows, a book no farmer, walker or gardener should be without. Compiled by the Networks for Nature project, which joins government departments, semi-state agencies, farming organisations and environmental NGOs in raising awareness of the vital role of hedgerows in the natural landscape, it is obtainable from PO Box 9184, Churchtown, Dublin 14.