Country life
Rabbits galore
Peter Quince
There is a good deal imore -fluctuation in the numbers of different species of birds and animals than the casual observer might suppose. We are used to the idea that the human population has been going through a process of more or less steady increase for a great many centuries, but wild life populations fluctuate, in obedience to a different set of pressures, by no means all of them imposed by man. Humans play an important part, of course, There would be no pheasants in England, or foxes either, I dare say, if it did not suit man to have them at large; on the other hand there would probably be wolves and bustards and numerous other species if man had not decreed otherwise.
Variations in number are often caused by the weather. A really hard winter can reduce the population of some species of small birds to a mere fraction of what it had been the previous year. A falling off in the food supply, or in nesting-places, can produce similar results. There are other less apparent causes also. When I was a boy the chaffinch was, I believe, officially listed as Britain's most common bird, but in my part of England at least it has now become if not exactly a rarity, certainly nothing like so familiar a sight as I remember it to have been.
In my village we are at the moment very much aware of a. rapid increase in the rabbit population. Rabbits used to be plentiful, too much so for the farmers' liking. Then came myxomatosis and the rabbits were wiped out, in a singularly gruesome way. Last year they reappeared in smallish numbers, although in sufficient strength to eat away the edge of a wheat field which adjoined their favourite wooded hillside. I remember seeing their depredations and wondering if they foretold a full-scale return. This year, it begins to seem that they did so. I keep coming across new burrows where no rabbit has been seen for years and my spaniel, who devoted the best years of his life to fruitless pursuit of rabbits in various places, is glorying in one futile chase after another.
This is presumably the myxomatosis-resistant strain which has emerged since the plague first struck. It-is still a fairly localised phenomenon, I gather; a neighbouring village, two miles away in the next valley, still claims to be free from rabbits. They will be happy if they remain so (although I do not suppose they will). Rabbits have always been a great nuisance in the country, and our forebears went to much trouble with traps and ferrets to keep them clear of crops and gardens; but time was when they had a value to man to balance their hungry demands. Nowadays they are not even generally acceptable as food, poor beasts.
This is a change which has happened within my memory. I can remember when many a village had one somewhat equivocal character who made a sort of living by trapping rabbits to sell as meat (with a little extra income from the skins); and rabbit pie was a popular dish in countless households. That has pretty well gone now, doubtless because of the horrors of myxomatosis. I for one have no desire ever to eat rabbit again, not even the meat carefully labelled "tame rabbit" which I sometimes see on sale in our market town.
There is irony in the fact that this revulsion should have occurred just when meat is getting scarcer in the world, and more expensive. For a great many generations of country people the huge warrens which used to exist outside villages were valuable sources of meat. Mrs Beeton's original cookery book, published in 1861, included many pages of rabbit recipes, including the least appetising of all, Boiled Rabbi/ ("Ingredients — Rabbit, warer-i,
The output of rabbit meat from such breeding-grounds must have been vast; it formed an important part of the diet of the rural poor, especially as it could be got for nothing by any skilful countryman, whether the land-owner approved or not. Usually it seems, landowners tried to prevent the local people from helping themselves to rabbits, although it is hard to see why in view of the damage they did to crops. Villagers could not afford wirenetting to proloct their own vegetable garden–that must have given them an extra incentive to defy the prohibition.
Defy it they did, and on a grand scale. Of the numerous ways of catching rabbits they employed, the most remarkable I have heard of was with the aid of a toad and a piece of candle. The candle was fixed to the back of the toad, and lit; then the toad was sent to crawl (down a rabbit hole, and the sight of the light advancing into their domain evidently sent the rabbits flying out into the open. I think if our present-day rabbits
as they seem about to d5 they will be dealt with in more thorough and less imaginative ways. Somehow I think enough will. survive to preserve the species,
Previous page
