Keeping the tools sharp
Smack in the middle of the three weeks I spent in San Diego after moving from Boston and before moving to Colombia, I felt myself getting complacent. The kitchen at mom’s house was stocked, there were dinners and happy reunions, there was beer and my upcoming wedding and friends I hadn’t seen in years. In short, I didn’t write a word for about two weeks.
It’s incredible how easy it is to let time go by without hoisting the pen — or tapping the keyboard — and it’s also incredible how easy it is for a writer’s tools to grow dull from neglect. I’m not exactly suggesting that you regress as a writer when you don’t write for a few weeks. I am suggesting, though, that without a routine, or at least without a consistent effort to get something on the page, you’ll never grow as a writer. And, too, there’s something about the stamina necessary for sustained writing that demands upkeep. Comparisons between writing and exercise have been done to death, so bear with me. But it is important to keep in mind that writing isn’t a skill that you possess. It’s a craft that you hone, so that the writing that comes out in print is — if that writing is worth someone’s time to read — just the tip of a very large ice burg. There is also the big icy chunk of writing — hard, ugly writing — that keeps you conditioned — sports comparison — for the stuff that does see the light of day. I used to stress this to my college students when they complained about the endless series of small writing assignments that led to larger essays. The best writers — at least the best writers that I know — spend a lot of time writing.
Which is why, two weeks after plunking myself in the happy purgatory of my mom’s spare room, I started getting the guilt. Man, nothing ruins a good time like that know-it-too-well guilt.
In the background of that guilt — even a writer’s guilt isn’t ALL-consuming — I was noticing something peculiar. My mom’s yard in San Diego, which backs onto a large green space — Cowles Mountain for you SoCal folks — was overrun with rabbits. 
The whole neighborhood, in fact, seemed full of wild rabbits. I mean FULL. Every morning rabbits nibbled the grass out back. Across the street, four rabbits chewed what was left of our neighbor’s yard. In the evenings, when I went out for a walk, they’d dart across the street ahead and behind me. I grew up in San Diego. I’d never seen so many rabbits.
So: I was full of angst about not writing AND I noticed something peculiar, a topic that demanded further investigation. Hmmm …
A quick pitch to the editor of our community paper — 1200 words about what residents are calling “an explosion” in the local rabbit population — and I landed myself a gig. Full disclosure: I didn’t know the first thing about rabbits. I didn’t even know what kind of rabbits I was dealing with — I didn’t even know if “rabbit” was the correct term, or if these were “hares” or “bunnies” or something else with which I had only a second grade storybook’s familiarity. But that’s one of the great things about nonfiction. There are plenty of people who DO know those things, and I was pretty sure I could find them. What ensued was a really fun week of immersing myself in all things rabbit. This isn’t the stuff of Pulitzers, but hey, it was a great time. I got to know my neighbors, got to stretch my writing legs, and got to put on my reporter’s hat. What better way to spend your last week at home?
Here’s the article: http://www.missiontimescourier.com/printFriendly.cfm?articleID=29587
And the full text:
| Rabbits Spell Trouble For Gardens, Lawns |
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Published 07/01/2011 – 8:00 a.m. PDT
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By Greg Nichols (Mission Times Courier, San Diego, CA) – Mari Jarvis has stopped fighting the rabbits. A resident of San Carlos whose house fronts the base of Cowles Mountain, Jarvis often wakes to find four or more cottontails—the hoary coated critters whose white bellies, elongated hind legs, and eponymous puffball tails distinguish them from other species—nibbling her lawn. Though initially irked by their voracity—small numbers of rabbits can reduce a lawn to a patchwork of brown in a few weeks—Jarvis eventually resigned herself to their appetites. From sheer persistence, the cottontails have also earned a measure of tolerance from the family’s yellow lab, Winnie, who now cedes her turf without so much as a chase. Residents in the Mission Trails area living near green space and abutments began noticing what appears to be a spike in the cottontail population early last summer. After two relatively wet winters—7.94 combined inches in December, January, and February of 2010 and 7.40 inches in the same months of 2011—vegetation in the area flourished. With well irrigated lawns providing a secondary food source, higher cottontail numbers are little surprise. For grillers and green thumbs, this abundance can mean havoc for backyard oases. “They’ll nibble on lawns, on grasses, they’ll eat ornamental flowers, they’ll eat vegetables certainly,” says Vincent Lazaneo, Urban Horticulture Advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension. “They can do some serious damage if they come often enough.” Small, fast, and persistent, cottontails are also notoriously difficult to deter. This has many in the area worried they may be fighting a losing battle. On Wing Span Dr., where Mari Jarvis and her neighbors have been under siege for months, the damage is evident. “Look at this grass,” says Arnie Rosenberg, a Wing Span Drive resident, as he surveys his front lawn. “They eat right down to the dirt.” Though loners in the wild, on this block it’s common to see cottontails cluster in twos and threes as they chomp unfenced front lawns with impunity. Unlike deer, which nibble only the tips of plants, the cottontails’ long and constantly growing incisors allow them to shear grass almost to the ground. Whatever stubby blades are left can’t survive the additional assault of urine and feces. Up and down Wing Span Drive, large brown patches on nearly every lawn substantiate what residents are calling “an explosion” in cottontail activity. Desert cottontails are common throughout the semi-arid land of the western United States and northern Mexico. They make their dens under low-lying brush, in abandoned badger holes, and beneath raised houses, sheds, and woodpiles. Active in the morning and evening, they hunker down during hotter parts of the day to conserve water and energy. Cottontails extract most of their water from the grasses and plants that comprise their diet, making them well suited to environments like Cowles Mountain that lack streams and rivers. Unlike many species of rabbit, desert cottontails can, and in Southern California frequently do, breed year-round if food is plentiful. A cottontail litter can have as many as six kits—short for kittens—and a single female can bear as many as 30 kits per year. In normal years, San Diego’s dry summer months shrink the rabbits’ available food supply and offset populations that rise in the plentiful spring months. One consequence of suburbanization in eastern San Diego is that irrigated lawns and gardens now provide a stopgap source of food. “Their strategy for survival is to take advantage of abundance,” Lazaneo says. “As vegetation dries down, they’re going to be looking at the greenery in yards.” That’s bad news for residents living near green space and nature preserves, who can expect more cottontail damage in the dry weeks to come. Even for residents who don’t live near canyons or trails, though, an increase in the rabbit population may yield undesirable consequences. As Scott Tremor, a mammalogist with the San Diego Natural History Museum, points out, one of the first things ecology students are taught in school is the coyote/lagomorph model. When rabbit populations grow, predator populations respond. “If there are more rabbits, we’ll end up seeing coyote populations increase,” Tremor says. “There’s always a lag. And then rabbit populations will decrease and we’ll see them going after cats and dogs more, jumping into people’s yards.” Since coyotes cover significantly more ground—around three miles per night—than the homebody cottontails, residents throughout the Mission Trails area should stay vigilant. Meanwhile, on Wing Span Drive, people have adopted a variety of pest management strategies to help save their lawns. Next door to Jarvis, Sharon Fields and Kimberly Washington, whose diabetic schnauzer developed a taste for rabbit poop, lined their backyard fence with wire mesh. When the rabbits still got in, the couple did another sweep to plug openings they’d missed. So far their diligence has paid off—they haven’t seen a rabbit in their backyard in months and their dog’s blood sugar is back under control. Front yards are a different story. Arnie Rosenberg, who lives next to Fields and Washington, keeps a pellet gun handy to defend his unfenced lawn. Desert cottontails are classified as game animals under California’s Fish and Game Code. Tenants and property owners don’t need a license to trap or kill cottontails that are damaging crops or landscaping (though residents who want to go this route should contact the California Department of Fish and Game to determine the best legal methods for doing so). Rosenberg, a crack shot from 30 feet, says he averages two or three kills per week. He admits, though, that while personally satisfying, his approach hasn’t done much to keep the rabbits at bay. According to Vincent Lazaneo, the best approach for dealing with cottontails is exclusion by means of a short fence. Cottontails don’t jump very high and aren’t adept burrowers. A chicken wire fence 24 inches tall and buried at least six inches is enough to keep lawns and gardens relatively rabbit-free. Modular fence panels and short fence stakes are available for unfenced front lawns. Noisemakers are also available, though Lazaneo says these are less effective. “A lot of the things to scare them away they learn don’t have much bite. There are some repellants that work for a while, but it depends how hungry the animal is.” Lazaneo says that chemical repellents are most helpful if applied before the rabbits have raided a yard. Once they’ve found a source of food, they’re likely to be less deterred by non-lethal measures. While some breeds of dog may scare cottontails away, there are no guarantees. All three households interviewed for this article have dogs, and all three have plenty of rabbits. In the end, residents who live near wilderness will always be burdened by—and blessed with—the resilience of the natural world. With the rabbits showing no sign of relenting, Mari Jarvis may have found the best way to cope. Every morning she makes a cup of coffee, looks outside, and spends a few meditative minutes watching the rabbits nibble their breakfast. If you can’t beat them, Jarvis figures, you may as well enjoy them. |