Write It, and They Will Leave

Was it something I said?

Last week I wrote about the over-abundance of bunnies this year. The Rapid City Journal wrote about them as well, after one of our city council members (councilpersons? councilpeople?) commented on cottontail crowding at a council meeting.

A couple of days later, the cottontails were gone. No adolescent bunnies playing in the driveway or sneaking into the garage. No little nose-twitching, bright-eyed statues beside the road when I went for a walk. Not so much as a glimpse of a white tail vanishing into the grass.

What happened? Maybe they got out their leather vests and went to the Rally (on their Harley softails, of course). Maybe they came down with some fast-acting lagomorphic disease and expired. Maybe they all hopped down the bunny trail to a family reunion. Maybe the neighborhood foxes had a family reunion and invited the bunnies to be guests of honor for the main course. Maybe they’re all holed up somewhere producing the next generation of bunnies.

Or maybe they didn’t care for what I wrote, and didn’t care to be discussed in the newspaper, so they all cancelled their subscriptions to the paper and their links to my blog, and they’ve left the neighborhood in protest. Everybody’s a critic.

On the other hand, this opens up some possibilities. The other critters we have to excess in Rapid City (besides deer, mountain lions, and—this week, anyway—Hogs) are geese.

We went for a walk the other evening in Canyon Lake Park. The hundreds (no, that’s not an exaggeration; I wish it were) of geese and ducks who have made the lake their home have turned the place into a disgusting mess. If any kids are naïve enough to play ball or Frisbee on the grass, the resulting green smears on their clothes aren’t going to be grass stains. You can’t even enjoy the beauty of the lake, because you’re too busy watching where you walk. Doing the “goose step” anywhere near the lake doesn’t mean marching like Hitler’s storm troops. It means tip-toeing, skipping, and side-stepping your way along the sidewalk in order to avoid the excess of excrement that is turning a beautiful park into a foul fowl habitat.

Maybe, if I write something nasty about the geese, they’ll all get mad and leave. At least it’s worth a try.