A cottontail rabbit. Image courtesy of naturehaven.com.
Almost every day, I walk Buddy the Wonderdog in the woods by my home. This past summer, I was creeped out to see two dead rabbits on the edge of the woods. The incidents happened at separate times but in almost the same locations. The rabbits’ heads were gone, but much of their bodies was still there.
Then yesterday, I saw a headless rabbit again along a different edge of the woods. It lay in the snow with its fur ruffled at the beginning of the trailhead — almost as if someone had placed it there on purpose. A bloody mangled mess of muscle marked where its head and one of its legs had been. No animal tracks led to or from the body. It was as if the rabbit dropped from the sky.
Mysterious.
I finally got curious enough to investigate. I searched the internet for “animals that eat rabbit heads.” I came up with a story from the Toronto Star in Canada that described the horror some schoolchildren felt when they found headless bunnies near their schoolyard. The children thought a person with evil intentions decapitated the rabbits.
However, people familiar with the ways of wild animals responded that the bunnies were the work of an owl, not a Satanic Cult. They explained that owls can’t carry the whole rabbit, so they only take the head.
That’s the same explanation my woods-wise friends gave me when I described the gruesome scene from my dog walks. Also, brains are made out of fat, so I suppose owls get more energy from eating them than from eating other parts of a rabbit.
Similar to the situation mentioned in the news article, the rabbits’ bodies I saw this summer were near the same location each time. I think that makes sense. Animals tend to hang out in the same places. If an owl found a rabbit in a certain place one time, it must be a good place for rabbits, so they are likely to hunt there again.
The lack of tracks also makes the case for an owl doing the killing (or some other type of raptor) versus a human or an animal. The owl attacked from above, so of course it wouldn’t leave tracks.
I am glad to learn that the headless bunnies are just a case of nature taking its course, and not the work of twisted humans. But I am still sorta creeped out.
I meandered up the North Shore of Lake Superior last month for a writing workshop offered by Sam Cook, noted book author and outdoors writer for the Duluth News Tribune. The workshop was offered by North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota.
To cover the cost of the symposium and field trip, I wrote two magazine articles about martens. They are both out on newsstands now. The first ended up as the cover story for the
I might write a magazine story about the trip, so I can’t describe it much here. Suffice it to say, the canoe portages were much harder than when I did them in college with six other people.
A hike on a hill above Beaver Bay with one of his sons inspired Enger to set the novel on the North Shore, and then the story came to him.
Whitman has been a long-time favorite of mine, ever since I read a first-edition version of “Leaves of Grass” (pictured, copyright 1959) that I think my parents gave me off their bookshelf. It kept me company during a summer on Isle Royale National Park in the middle of Lake Superior. No libraries there! So I lugged a duffle bag full of books along with me when I worked as a waitress at the resort on the island during college.
Marie's Meanderings 