Butter Side Down

Woot! Woot! Kris, me n’ the bunnies are sending a salute to you!

After you told me about bracketing, I went spelunking through my 200 page camera manual and found this:

It lets me automatically push the exposure in several different ways on its own, and combines with other pre-set or manual options.

Oh, yeah.

Thank you, Kris!

(The little bunny pictured, btw, lives in one of my flower beds - she was a gift from Michael. She’s the only bunny in our yard that doesn’t eat my flowers!)

Meet Juan’s little sister, Hay!

She’s much shier than her brother Juan - but enjoys chomping flowers almost as much as he does. Since I still can’t really use a computer much, I’m going to start posting photos with an itty bit of commentary until this shoulder/neck/back thing calms down. So… here’s Hay!

Most wild bunnies don’t have any white on them, but Hay has a very distinctive white spot on her forehead.

Guess who? This is Big Sis, Hay and Juan’s big sister! She’s from Petunia’s first litter, born in early spring. Big Sis has Petunia’s unusually colored fur (it’s very blotchy) and is exceptionally shy of humans. She’s the only bunny that’s still here from that spring litter. All we usually see of her is a flash of her white cottontail as she dives into the ferns!

Hay (back) and Big Sis (front)! Although they look similar in size in this photo, it’s only because the perspective I shot it from is rather distorted. Big Sis is at least twice Hay’s size.

Lots more photos to come…

Juan, the baby bunny!

This little rascal is very skittish, unlike his parents, Stewart and Petunia. It’s taken me three weeks to get any photos of him at all, as he’s (wisely) quite wary of us. He’s the boldest of his litter, however, which includes only one other bunny at this point. Petunia did have several other babies in this litter, but from what we can tell the female Cooper’s Hawk who has taken up residence nearby has taken quite a toll.

Juan is a flower mowing machine, the most destructive baby bunny we’ve had in years — which is saying a lot! He delights in reaching up as far as he can, whilst standing on his hind legs, to nibble off the tops of flowers. He’s perfectly happy mowing them down from the bottom, side and middle, too, and happily strips the leaves off of plants he doesn’t find tasty, just on general principle as far as I can tell.

I don’t have any photos of his little sister, Hay, yet. We usually see her just as a miniature bunny-colored streak racing from one hiding place to another!

Ferns aren’t supposed to sneeze. Given that little fact of nature, I was rather startled when I went past the bank of ferns that are behind our house this afternoon and heard a very distinct sneeze.

Then… I started to laugh.

*Judy stands with her hands behind her back and says in a very sing-song voice, “I know that you’re in there! That’s you, Missus Bunny! You’ve got baby bunnies!”*

To confirm my suspicions, I carefully studied the ferns from a prudent non-bunny-disturbing distance, and finally pinpointed a spot where I could see a set of bunny whiskers amidst the plants. Yep. Missus Bunny was hiding in the ferns. Michael and I have named her Petunia, by the way. We’re calling her Pet for short…

When I had the audacity to reach over and pluck a fern frond that was growing into the pathway several feet from her hiding spot, Petunia indignantly hopped out. She then skittered across the yard, radiating “I’m just a lone bunny, all by myself, you can just pay attention to me hopping over here. Nope, nothing under the ferns you need to bother looking at. Really. Move along.”

I wasn’t snookered.

She’s about half the size she was two weeks ago. Also, I’ve found tufts of bunny fur here and there buried in little rabbit scratches. Momma bunnies dig scratches like that and line them with tufts of their own fur when they’re testing out potential nursery sites.

I can’t wait to see this year’s little dandelion chompers!

It’s time to take you on a garden walk and share what’s blooming, chirping, squeaking and squawking.

I’d love to claim the grape hyacinths in this first photo as my own, but they really belong to our neighbors, Dan and Diana. I’d never seen this plant before Dan put a patch in two years ago. They’re gorgeous, carefree, and apparently the bunnies don’t think they taste good. How can you not love a flower with those qualities?

This robin has been singing daily from a perch in our birch tree. I haven’t found the nest yet, but I’ve found the remains of several robins’ eggshells, so somewhere, in one of the trees, there is a nest.

We have a huge bank of ferns, all originating from a single clump Michael’s grandmother gave us when we moved to Wisconsin. I am always intrigued by the way ferns ‘unroll’ in the spring before slowly turning into their familiar frond shape.

I am delighted to have this Blue Jay dive-bombing the feeders at regular intervals. West Nile virus decimated the jays, and they went from being common in our yard to completely absent for several years. Last summer was the first time I started to see and hear jays again. This one arrived about ten days ago. I hope it stays, as Blue Jays love snacking on nests of yellow jackets — and we’ve had an overabundance of those irritable little critters since the onset of West Nile caused the jay population to plummet.

I have several Bergenia plants, and they are among the first plants to bloom in the spring. The large flat leaves of this plant turn reddish-brown during the winter, and then turn quite green again in the spring, surviving even our -20F temperatures.

And of course I see Missus Bunny almost daily. Here she is sizing up the green grocery while waiting for the baby bunnies to arrive!

More to come…