Whether you want to attract or repel ‘em, here’s what you need to know.
As a wildlife biologist, Michael Mengak hears from two camps of homeowners with two very different views about bunnies in their backyards.
“There are the gardeners, the master gardeners, master naturalists, the people that like to work in their yards with flowers and plants, who are happy to have the squirrels, who are happy to have a rabbit,” says Mengak, who teaches at the Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. “And then there’s the group that are like, ‘Keep those deer and those squirrels [and rabbits] away from me.’ I get all kinds of people, both wanting to attract, and wanting to repel, wildlife.”
What attracts the eastern cottontail—the only rabbit species found in the Blue Ridge area—is what Mengak calls “succession habitat,” or areas altered by weather, deterioration and natural changes: weeds and tall grasses, toppled trees, un-mowed power line right-of-ways, bushes and brush piles. “Any kind of disturbed area with thick vegetation makes a better cover for the rabbit to live in,” he says.
Here, Mengak offers a few tips on how to draw or deter bunnies, depending on your preference.
Pro-bunny:
- Get a little messy. “If there’s vegetation and there’s cover, you will likely have rabbits,” Mengak says. Let honeysuckle vines and blackberry vines spread. At his own house, Mengak plants low-growing forsythia, which provides a good hiding place for bunnies and other critters.
© Ryan Rice
- Don’t worry about cultivating specific veggies, like carrots. “That’s great if you’re four years old and all you watch is Disney,” Mengak jokes. “But it’s not really what we try to teach intelligent grownups.” Bunnies, he says, will eat just about anything you grow in your garden.
- Understand that if you build habitat for bunnies, predators like hawks and coyotes may follow, so keep that in mind if your small pets go outdoors.
One misconception, Mengak says, is that rabbits dig burrows. North American species sometimes use ready-made holes, but they don’t create them.
No-bunny:
Mengak suggests two humane options:
- Clear debris and undergrowth.
- Spray deer and rabbit repellant in your garden. To bunnies, it smells like sulphur, but humans generally can’t detect it.
“Remember, most of these animals have a sense of smell that’s 100 or 1,000 times better than ours. It may smell bad to them, but [to us] it really doesn’t smell like a rotten egg sitting in your trash can in your kitchen because you forgot to take out the trash last night,” Mengak says. The downside is that you’ll have to reapply it after every watering or rain shower. And don’t spray it directly on edible food crops.
- For a more permanent solution, erect a sturdy fence around your yard. A two-foot-tall section of chicken wire will keep bunnies out of your tomatoes and other veggies. Just take it down at the end of the growing season. “Rabbits don’t climb like raccoons do,” Mengak says. “And they don’t jump like deer.”
For the best of both worlds, protect your garden with fencing but leave some unkempt grass in your backyard. And don’t worry if the bunnies you spotted last year are nowhere in sight. Says Mengak, “Just because they disappear doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a rabbit disaster. The habitat changes, and the rabbits change, and they go somewhere else to live.”
The story above first appeared in our March / April 2024 issue.
