Seattle rabbits seem to be breeding like, well, rabbits

Little brown bunnies seem to be everywhere. People are seeing them in their gardens, in driveways, even in the streets. What gives?

It could be that rabbits are living up to their reputation as virile breeders ... or that they're getting dumped by families after the Easter holiday.

Sue Brennan runs a shelter for bunnies in Gig Harbor called Rabbit Haven. She’s spent the last 35 years rescuing domestic rabbits that have been abandoned.

After Easter and the end of the school year are popular times for families to “dump” rabbits that are no longer wanted, says Brennan. Domestic rabbits are the third most popular house pet in the nation after dogs and cats, but she says people adopt them without realizing how much work and money it takes to care for them ... and children don’t want the responsibility.

She says if you see bunnies in the wild that are any other color than the flecked brown shade of wild eastern cottontails, those are domestic rabbits. Domestics live and have their babies, called kits, in burrows whereas wild cottontails nest in a land depression or divot.

Since they have no survival skills, domestic rabbits become easy prey. Brennan recommends you try and catch them and take them to a rescue shelter like Rabbit Haven or your local Humane Society. Interestingly, Brennan says domesticated rabbits can’t reproduce with wild cottontails because of a missing gene link.

Brennan wants us to live peacefully with all nature, not just bunnies. All wild animals help make our area such a precious place to live. She says “just watch them and enjoy them, let them be.”

So far, there doesn't seem to be an infestation, says Aaron Wirsing, who teaches at the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Services, although, yes, there are more bunnies than usual here at the moment.

This does recall the great bunny roundup of 2006, when 48 rabbits were captured in the wooded areas around Green Lake, according to seattlepi.com.

They were placed in cages at Magnuson Park, the seattlepi.com reported, but there was a problem: the building where they were placed doubled as training space for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the bunnies were scared and the bunny keepers were furious. There weren't many more rabbit roundups after that.

There have been more rabbit sightings in recent years ... with some theorizing that what was once a small population is simply growing. After all, consider that your average mama bunny can birth 20 babies in a year, and she can get started at three months old.