Derbyshire Mammal Group

by Debbie Court

Like other mammals, rabbits make numerous appearances in children’s literature and folklore. Who could forget Bugs Bunny, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, and the Easter Bunny? Saying ‘rabbits’ or ‘white rabbits’ on the first of the month is meant to bring good luck and so is stroking a rabbit’s foot.

The rabbit is a medium sized mammal with body length up to 400mm long. The colour of a rabbit's coat varies, but it is usually grey with reddish streaks on the back, and tends to be paler underneath. Their hair is very thick and soft. Rabbits are keen to keep themselves dry as wet fur loses its warmth. They have big ears which are up to 70mm long but do not have black tips as the brown hare’s do. They have a distinctive white fluffy tail and large black eyes. Between January and August rabbits can give birth every 5-6 weeks and can have up to 4–8 young per litter. The young rabbits are born blind, deaf and almost hairless; they can open their eyes after 10 days. Then they start to venture from the nest after about 25 days. After 4 months they are old enough to breed themselves!

Rabbits have a large number of predators including foxes, cats, stoats, polecats, badgers, buzzards and weasels. In some areas farmers have to control rabbits to prevent severe damage to crops. Rabbits rely on their long ears to warn them of danger and rarely venture further than 200 metres from the safety of their burrows.

It is generally recognised that the rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) was introduced to Britain by the Normans about 900 years ago. Then it was regarded as a luxury to have rabbits as they reproduced quickly and were a good source of fur and meat. Before the days of fridges and freezers they were considered a convenient size for a meal without too much wastage. They were kept in special walled enclosures called warrens, a term which today means a rabbit colony and its burrows. A ‘Warrener’ looked after the warren, fed the rabbits and protected them from predators. Eventually escapes were inevitable and rabbits became established on sandy soils and places where it was easy for the rabbits to dig and poor enough that no one wanted to grow crops on it. In the 1700s the Enclosure Acts provided ideal habitat for rabbits. The newly planted hedgerows provided opportunities for rabbits to create warrens adjacent to crops.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the rabbit was recognised as an agricultural pest. By the early 1950’s the rabbit population in Britain was close to 100 million. Then about 40 million were killed every year for their fur and meat but the cost to agricultural crops was estimated to be £1 million a year. The South American Myxoma virus is carried by rabbit fleas and mosquitoes and specifically affects the Ocyctolagus genus of rabbits. It was introduced to Australia in the 1950s in an attempt to control their rabbit populations. Swiss scientists studying the disease liberated some infected rabbits in Paris in 1952. It was first discovered in Britain in Kent in October 1953. The spread of myxomatosis across Britain was vary rapid and wiped out almost 99% of the rabbit population. Today the virus is still present in the population but has become weaker and only affects 60% of the animals it infects. The decline of the rabbit had a major effect on grasslands which began to scrub up having had centuries of plentiful rabbit grazing.

Rabbits are very common and widely distributed across Britain and Ireland, but are absent from the Isle of Rum and the Scilly Isles. Middleton (1969 ) shows rabbits to be one of the most common mammals recording them from 120 1km grid squares. Clinging and Whiteley (1985) record rabbits as common in the lowlands and the White Peak but are rarely found above 1600ft on the high gritstone moorlands. You might like to look up the distribution map for the Sorby area 1970-1997 and 1980-2000 on the Sorby Natural History Website at www.sorby.org.uk.

Rabbit records from the DMG database are shown below: -

Did you know?...

• A mother rabbit makes a special nursery nest out of grass and moss, and lines it with hairs plucked from her own chest. Normally her fur is firmly anchored but during breeding, it becomes loose and easy to pluck.

• Rabbits thump their back legs to warn other rabbits of danger.

• Rabbits are associated with bad luck on the Island of Portland in Dorset. The former penal colony got prisoners to extract stone from local quarries which were riddled with rabbit warrens. When an inexperienced prisoner picked the wrong stone it was likely to fall out and kill or injure someone. The cry of ‘Rabbits’ became the warning shouted to fellow workers to warn them of imminent danger. Even today it if frowned upon to say the word rabbit on the island and locals refer instead to “underground mutton” or just “furry things”. Rumour has it that posters for the recent Wallace and Gromit film ‘The curse of the Were-Rabbit’ were banned on the island!

Further reading:
• Leach, M. (1989) The Rabbit. Shire, Aylesbury.
• McBride, A. (1988) Rabbits and Hares. Whittet Books, London.
• Thompson, H.V. & King, C.M. (1994) The European Rabbit. Oxford Science publications.
• Middelton, J. F. (1969) Mammals of the Derby area. Derby Junior Naturalists.
• Clinging, V. & Whiteley, D. (1985) Mammals IN The Natural History of the Sheffield Area. Sorby   Natural History Society, Sheffield.