Buzzard’s and bunny hunting

I took the dog for a walk through the low-lying fields along the edge of the bog.

Luckily he ignores sheep, otherwise I would have had to pick a different route. But his restraint doesn’t extend to rabbits and he used up a lot of energy in fruitless pursuit of bobbing white scuts.

This was interesting because in all the years I have been walking these fields I’ve never seen rabbits in them before. Irish rabbits are an introduced species from Iberia and North Africa. Rabbits differ from hares in that they live in burrows and what makes my sighting unusual is that low-lying fields fringing a bog are not an ideal habitat for them. The water table is high and there is a continual threat that their burrows will be flooded.