ANOTHER LIFE:THE LAST apple tree to ripen, the Braeburn, hung on to the last of its fruit right through the gales, mocking my rush with the stepladder a month ago, writes MICHAEL VINEY.
They hang from bare twigs like forgotten Christmas-tree baubles, hollowed out by the blackbirds with whom, perforce, and the glitter of redundant CDs notwithstanding, we share the crop each autumn.
The neighbouring trees in the orchard were equally overloaded in October, and being of sweeter flavour (Jonagold) dropped their finest and ripest apples at the first hint of an equinoctial breeze. The birds seized upon these at sunrise, and feasting beside them as I went out to measure the rain one morning were new visitors to the acre, a pair of rabbits, quick to scamper off into the shadows.
The nearest big warrens are a full kilometre away, in the dunes and the fields beside the strand, and in between are all manner of ditches, hedges and streams - a regular Watership Down of an adventure. It's been obvious this summer that rabbits are in resurgence along this sandy shore, their noonday grazing a mark of the peace it has to offer. October sees a rabbit colony reaching its peak, and the dispersal of even two this far up the hill suggests pressure to explore pastures new.
Back in our pioneering, tryeverything days, the rabbits were to be part of our food economy. My amateurishness, both with snares and guns, resolved that rather quickly, and was overtaken in any case by a new wave of myxomatosis, in which the duach became a periodic horror-show of blinded, blundering animals and little heaps of rain-matted fur and tented bones. By the end of the 1980s, there was nothing for the dog to chase.
But inherited resistance to the virus was detected in Britain as early as the 1970s and similar genetic selection has reinforced it steadily here, perhaps to the point of its extinction. Even the subsequent rabbit sickness Viral Haemorrhagic Disease (VJD), of which some plaguemasters had high hopes, seems to have made little headway. Rabbits in these islands already showed antibodies to existing and milder strains.
How many rabbits are there in Ireland? Twenty years ago, in the immediate myxo aftermath, there were estimates of about four million supposedly one-fifth of the population before the virus. But counting rabbits even in one warren is not easy. As Tom Hayden and Rory Harrington wrote in Exploring Irish Mammals:"It may be necessary to walk along a predetermined route and count rabbits feeding in the evening at least 20 times before a reliable average figure can be calculated. Even then, such counts carried over a long period are really only useful to indicate whether the population is increasing or decreasing."
A group of British zoology students spent several holidays at a warren on Mayo's Mullet Peninsula in a determined attempt at a census. This included watching 20 separate rabbits with binoculars for two hours each to get some idea of their comings and goings. Their final estimate for the dunes came out at 383 rabbits per hectare, which caused Prof James Fairley, so expert on our furry mammals, to wonder about double-counting in judging which rabbits used which holes.
Ten rabbits eat as much grass as one sheep (only half-a-dozen if it's the IFA talking), so the war goes on to keep numbers down. There are new poisons and gases, new ways of blowing up burrows from a safe distance.
But there are also new predators in Ireland since myxo. Along with stoat, fox and badger, there has been the island-wide spread of feral mink and a quite new resurgence of the pine marten.
Attack from the air must be increasing too, with each new introduction of a bird of prey. Golden eagles in Donegal, white-tailed eagles in Kerry, red kites in Wicklow, all count rabbits as food, as does the resident hen harrier and the buzzard, now rapidly expanding across the island. Perhaps, in these straitened times, humans, too, will welcome rabbit again to the menu: Gordon Ramsay, after all, does a creamy rabbit and wild garlic risotto, Richard Corrigan a saddle of rabbit with black pudding and mushroom juice.
Not everyone wants to get rid of rabbits: their nibbling can do a good job. The Murlough nature reserve in Co Down is Ireland's finest example of sand dunes and heath, exceptionally rich in wild plants and associated butterflies and moths. When myxomatosis wiped out most of the rabbits, the heath was quickly overwhelmed by prickly sea buckthorn, old heather and self-seeded trees. In the National Trust's struggle to restore the species-rich habitat, it actually imported rabbits and nursed them through their first winter with a supply of parsnips and carrots. Today, the re-established rabbits join ponies and cattle in keeping the sward free of unwanted vegetation.