We have some “rascally wabbits” in our neighborhood.

Earlier this year, Susan went in our backyard to start working on the raised garden beds she put in last year. While she was poking around, much to her surprise, she heard noise coming from the ground. It was a nest full of wild bunnies.

Fortunately, our garden has a fence around it that keeps out our two pugs. It apparently doesn’t keep out wild rabbits.

We covered the tiny rabbits back up and left them alone. In a couple of weeks, they were gone. They apparently grow very quickly.

In May, it happened again.

Our pugs were making a fuss around a planter attached to our back wall when my son discovered another next of bunnies. After putting the dogs inside, he grabbed some fencing and put up a shield around the nest to protect the bunnies.

That worked for one day.

I was working out in the back yard, trimming, when I grazed a bunny nestled up in a corner of our brick fence. He let out a yelp. He wasn’t hurt bad – I hit part of one of his tiny ears.

But he was outside the nest.

Then I found another one hidden in another corner. Then there was another one hidden in some tall grass.

It seems that the pugs got close enough to the nest to cause the mother rabbit to move the bunnies to what she thought might be some safer spots.

We suspect that the mother rabbit has taken up residence in a burrow under our backyard shed. The dogs surprised her at daybreak one morning and she outraced them to the shed. She got under it easily – they couldn’t.

We had a problem. We can’t keep the dogs out of the backyard and we didn’t want them to kill those bunnies.

So we gathered up five bunnies and transferred them to our front courtyard. We have some ground plants there and the bunnies quickly scurried under the protection of the leafy ground plants.

We live near 71st Street and Sheridan Road. We see hawks circling our neighborhood all the time. There are other predators, too. Susan once saw a coyote walking down the side street next to our house. I saw two possums walking through a neighbor’s yard in broad daylight. There is an acreage of woods on the west side of Sheridan Road, just east of Montereau Retirement Community and I think some of our critters come from there.

There is also a some wooded area by the water tanks on the hill at 61st Street and Sheridan Road and I am sure there are animals living there.

I realize that baby rabbits probably have a short life span but I didn’t want to make it easy for some other animal to have one for lunch. And, I didn’t want to take in a bunch of bunnies and try to domesticate them. In fact, even though the bunnies are really, really cute and cuddly, I don’t want rabbits in my yard.

We already have a whole village of squirrels. We had to build a chicken wire cage for our tomatoes to keep the squirrels from raiding them. It’s infuriating to go in the backyard on a summer morning an see a perfect homegrown tomato lying on the ground after a squirrel has taken one bite out of it and discarded.

I wouldn’t feel so bad if they actually were hungry and ate the whole thing. (By the way, the pugs have caught at least two squirrels and it wasn’t a happy ending for the squirrels).

The squirrels taunt the dogs and they seem to think it’s some kind of game until a pug catches one of them.

Well, we found one of the bunnies in the courtyard had expired. We think the rest were big enough to make it on their own. They are expert at hiding and their brown coloring makes them tough to spot. The mother rabbit might have abandoned them after we moved them. We wanted to leave them in the nest but that was not possible.

I guess we need to somehow find out if that rabbit or rabbits (there must be two or we wouldn’t be getting all these bunnies) are living under our shed. We don’t want to kill them but just relocate them.

Whenever the City of Tulsa decided to make pet owners keep their cats inside, the city’s rabbit population flourished.

People do keep rabbits as pets and people hunt rabbits (you can’t hunt them in the city limits). There are rabbit breeders in Tulsa.

I really have no ambition to have rabbits as pets or to hunt or eat rabbits. I have no problem with anyone who does do that.

I just want to stop these wild “wabbits” from overpopulating my backyard.