The news media have reported on the environmental impact of the quarantine. Clean skies over Los Angeles. Goats wandering on the streets of a village in Wales. Nature reclaiming its own.
So when I saw a young bunny nibbling on the grass in my neighbor’s yard, I chalked it up to that. We have lots of squirrels and the occasional opossum, but not rabbits. Maybe this was a local example of what was happening globally. Isn’t nature wonderful?
This morning the neighborhood feral cat dropped the bunny, still twitching, in the middle of my back yard. Eventually it lay still. I went to the kitchen to make some tea, and as I write this, both the cat and I are having breakfast.
Later on, I’ll take a shovel to whatever is left behind. It has been a good spring for cardinals and robins – I’d rather not have crows or hawks dropping by.
As Emily Dickinson once observed, “Nature, like us, is sometimes caught / Without her diadem.”