Saturday, June 30, 2012

This is the second Saturday of summer, and the first full week of summer closes. June 30, 2012 is the day of the rabbit. 83 days of summer remain.

Rabbit_in_montana

As I bike through summer, I find rabbits taking positions on the
grassy margins of trails. I was biking from the Third Street Promenade
to Pere Marquette Trail though Randy Crow's land, and I counted three
or four. I scared five or six into the weeds on the Grand River
Greenway through Spring Lake and Grand Haven. I see rabbits every time
I cross the Cress Creek bridge to arrive home. Last evening, around
six, I notice a newly fledged bunny peering down at the rapid water,
perched where one hop could land her in the water three feet below.
She will be ready to have a litter of her own before Christmas.
Barring capture by a coyote, which are active in the surrounding woods
and marshes of my home, or another predator, that rabbit might live
twelve years. A very old rabbit once lived to be 18 years old. By next
year, that rabbit could have 800 children, grand children and great
grand children show up at her second Christmas.

Rabbits are prolific breeders, and every aspect of breeding is built
for speed. Courtship lasts thirty seconds and a doe can feed an infant
rabbit, a kit or kitten, in two or three minutes. Doe's milk is
intensely nutritious. I have had courtships last the time to drink a
twelve ounce Strohs.I haven't had a real Strohs Beer since the
eighties, the twentieth century eighties. Yes, I have read Desmond
Morris's "The Naked Ape".

My mother attempted to raise rabbits in her garage, and the first and
only litter died at the mother's hand. Mouth? Front paws? The young
are born helpless, furless and blind.This upset my mother greatly, and
she gave up the experiment. She had told us to stay away from the
rabbit cages because a doe disturbed will put down her litter. Maybe
one of the dogs or cats got into the garage?

Since I went to a rural school district, we were allowed to
demonstrate country skills when giving speeches in language arts. I
was teamed up with a fellow named Tim, and he wanted to demonstrate
field dressing a rabbit. He had shot the rabbit in the early morning
before catching the bus. He cut a long incision from the chin to the
crotch of the rabbit and ordered me: "Pull out those guts". He didn't
tell me my role in advance. We only had five minutes, so he yanked out
the still warm innards with a practiced speed. This was a middle
school class. One boy in the audience said to his neighbor, "If you
can't do that, you can't go hunting".

I wasn't a total loss in country ways. My uncle Chaps taught me how to
clean fish by filleting, which left the innards inside and the scales
on the skin, which could be peeled off. I was fairly good at filleting
fish, and I had my own knife, a Rapala with a flexible blade. My
friend Rodney claimed filleting fish wasted meat. He would cut off the
head, gut the fish and scrape off the scales and drop the fish into
shore lunch mix and deep fry. My daughter loves rainbow trout and
salmon, but we buy that from fisheries, where the cleaning is down for
you. We have practiced catch and release when we go fishing. If I have
quail or hasenpfeffer, we have an unspoken agreement that I keep this
information to myself.

Mr. Rabbit is here with the shit, as goes the joke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit
"Where's My Hasenpfeffer? " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasenpfeffer

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