Baggin' the Big Game by the Bay

She's smiling, but you don't know

what she's thinking...good thing!

I remember watching "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" a lot when I was a kid. Marlon Perkins had epaulets on his safari shirt, and Jim was the closest guy to Tarzan I'd ever seen. Of course, there was very little wildlife left roaming the plains of eastern Kansas by then, but it was exciting to think that someday I could be running down a rampaging rhinocerous or jumping giraffes or something really cool. Little did I know I would have to wait until this week to capture my first big game. It's been a long wait.

It all began in the flower beds when this year's bumper crop of bunnies began ingesting everything in sight except for the chives. Naturally, my wife was not amused, and the bunnies, while cute enough at Easter, were on the road to a World War Two-like relocation even if they did not know it at the time.

Things came to a head when newly-planted flowers became rabbit food recently. Knowing that during the month of July there were two special occasions (our anniversary and her birthday) I resolved to make a Herculean effort to convince the herbivorous plague to hippity hop down the bunny trail...so I bought a trap; "Happy Anniversary, Dear!" (this for the woman who has everything, including unwanted rabbits!).

I dutifully loaded the trap with what I thought were tasy morsels, but the buffet seemed lacking, at least as far as real results were concerned. My sign: "Bunny Fru Fru's Salad Ranch" didn't seem to do the trick, nor did the neon lights and alluring pictures of female rabbits. Once I came to the porch to discover a rabbit sitting inside the trap eating grass outside the front door! He had not even gone far enough in to spring the door shut. However, a few days ago, my wife awoke on her birthday to discover a rabbit had sprung the trap, and we had captured our first "wascally wabbit." No sooner had I deposited the critter in somebody else's yard miles away and returned home to set the trap anew than we caught another one! On my way to release it into the wild, I noticed that someone had squished one on the street...how many of these things could there be? They must have been breeding like, well, rabbits!

Today, another one succumbed to the succulent offerings of the rabbit trap so we know at least four of them are no longer part of the fauna of the landscape. Trumpeting like a would-be elephant lure, I stood in the back yard, resetting the trap.

Elmer Fudd was an amateur. Now all I need to do is to see my buddy Mark to get some shirts with epaulets on them.