Along a gritty stretch of Harrison Street just west of the Dan Ryan Expressway, cars and trucks zoom past in a whoosh of hot air and and blowing dust. Horns blare, sirens scream and every few minutes a city bus rumbles past, belching exhaust. In the background, the skyline rises like a mountain range of glass and steel.
This is the urban jungle — teeming with crowds, booming to a cacophony of sound, alive in a whirl of motion. But look closely. There — along the sidewalk — an Eastern cottontail rabbit hops down the cracked concrete. It perks its ears for a moment — alert to someone watching. Then it bounds into the scraggly bushes along the edge of a low-slung brick building, its white fuzzy tail disappearing into the brush.
It might seem an improbable sighting. A near miracle that such a creature could survive such an inhospitable environment. But survive it has, so much so that in recent years the urban rabbit has become as ubiquitous as the pigeons toddling around Daley Plaza or the squirrels that scurry through the trees in Lincoln Park.
Today, the cottontail is the new urbanite, tramping along our avenues like a bucktoothed hipster, lolling on the grass in Daley Bicentennial Park after an all-you-can-eat picnic. Rabbits even join the daily commute by bouncing along the on- and off-ramps of the Dan Ryan Expressway headed for the grassy shoulders that they now treat like their personal salad bars.
Though rabbits have long lived in Grant Park, a spike in the rabbit population has pushed the long-eared animals into the city’s most urban corners. Rabbits have overrun a CTA bus turnaround west of the Loop and destroyed a grove of 40 honey locusts on a landscaped embankment of the Kennedy Expressway.
“I saw one recently in a revolving door of a skyscraper in the Loop,” said Bob O’Neill, president of the Grant Park Conservancy. “The rabbit had gone in thinking it could enter the building!”
One night O’Neill — wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, shiny dress shoes, perfectly pressed pants and button-down shirt — led an urban rabbit hunt across the city, traversing busy thoroughfares, crawling under bushes and eyeing weedy edges of the parks. As the head of the conservancy, O’Neill has become a protector of the city’s trees, and thus an adversary of the rabbits, which feast on the tender bark of saplings.
“There never used to be rabbits anywhere in this area,” O’Neill yelled over the traffic noise as he stood on the Harrison Street overpass that straddles the Dan Ryan. He pointed to a group of elm trees — planted between the highway ramps — that had been gnawed to death by rabbits.
Down the street, he saw more telltale signs: rabbit teeth marks on tree trunks. Then, a rabbit sighting.
“There’s one!” he yelled, as he stepped into Oscar D’Angelo Park — a small patch of grass in the shadow of Sears Tower. “And there’s another!” Soon O’Neill was turning in circles, realizing that the rabbits were grazing in every corner of the park. Two dozen rabbits munched on the lush grass and hopped along the edge of the thick bushes — ignoring the homeless men camping nearby, the traffic on surrounding streets and the pedestrians who rushed along sidewalks. Less than 2 feet away from O’Neill, a baby rabbit sat at the edge of a gravel path.
“It’s almost as if you can go up and pet him,” whispered O’Neill, as he edged closer to the bunny. Though O’Neill despises rabbit damage, he has a soft spot for the rabbits themselves. “We’re creating more green space and we’re going to attract more nature — which is part of the plan. The urban rabbit is a sign of success,” he said, smiling down at the little bunny.
A siren wailed in the background as O’Neill pointed to the forsythia and lilac bushes, the crab apple and hawthorn trees that ring the park. The sweet smell of a privet hedge carried on the evening air. “You see this,” he said, his voice full of awe and wonder. “And you’re in downtown Chicago.”
The rise of the urban rabbit began in the late 1980s, when — shortly after the election of Richard M. Daley — the city launched an aggressive campaign to plant trees and gardens. The program placed planters along city roadways, turned boulevard medians into flower gardens and planted thousands of trees.
Such efforts transformed the city into a greening oasis and met with widespread voter support. But it also created a perfect habitat for rabbits that soon began nesting in the shrubbery and munching on the flowering smorgasbords.
The advent of leash laws and the lack of other predators allowed the rabbits to thrive. Coyotes that might normally cull the bunny population were chased, captured and removed by the city’s animal control officers. By 2001, the bunny population had boomed, and the rabbits had eaten their way through $100,000 worth of landscaping in Grant Park. Other cities around the country, including Miami, Hartford and Detroit, struggled with similar invasions.
“Rabbits are becoming very common in urban areas, and it’s no surprise because we’re creating ideal conditions,” said Michael Conover, editor of the scientific journal Human-Wildlife Conflicts.
Nibbling the life out of trees
In many ways, rabbits are perfectly suited to urban life. They feed at dawn and dusk — a habit that helps them avoid city dangers. They can live almost anywhere, at the edge of weed-lined alleys or in brush piles. And they can eat almost any plant. In the winter, when food is scarce, they munch on the bark of young trees — often “girdling” the tree by nibbling the lower bark in a ring and causing the tree to die.
Rabbit populations swell and shrink, depending on the number of predators and severity of winters. But their polygamous nature and their famously prolific breeding patterns — 28-day gestation period and five litters per season — help them bounce back quickly.
In 2003, Chicago Park District workers began aggressively wrapping young trees in the city’s parks with chicken wire and black plastic tubing to protect them from the rabbits. But soon, officials discovered the animals were hippity-hopping into the smallest urban green spaces, dining on trees that grow on the highway embankments and grazing on the flowers in concrete planters.
“Last spring we saw a rabbit on an overpass going to Congress from the Dan Ryan Expressway. It was on the side of the roadway just hopping along, ” said Joel Brown, a biology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“I saw one in a planter on Ohio Street three blocks east of Michigan Avenue,” said Liz O’Callaghan, operations manager at the Chicago Park District. “It stopped me cold. I thought, ‘There’s a rabbit!’ He was sitting there alone, and he wasn’t chewing anything.
“Maybe he was waiting for a taxi.”
Ability to handle the elements
To many city residents, the rabbits have become a symbol of survival, and their existence amid the traffic and crowds has become an inspiring daily sight. Ron Wolford, who teaches urban gardening at the University of Illinois Extension in Chicago, said that though he often chases rabbits out of his garden — he can’t help but admire the animal.
“I like the rabbits. I just like the fact those little animals can get the Chicago Park District all up in arms,” he said. “People need to take a deep breath and stop fighting. We’re never going to get rid of them, so we have to learn to coexist.”
Such a zenlike attitude might be the only defense when, in the coming months, the rabbit invasion is expected to get worse. Construction crews are poised to move into DuSable Park, an undeveloped, weed-ridden 3.2-acre peninsula northeast of Lake Shore Drive and the Chicago River that has long been considered ground zero for the rabbit population.
Within the next two months, the rabbit stronghold will become a noisy staging ground for construction of the Chicago Spire, the twisting 150-story lakefront skyscraper that is set to become the nation’s tallest building. When the bulldozers move in, the bunnies will move out, surging into city streets.
Then, “we will be in serious trouble,” said Susan Gibson, who lives next to DuSable Park. Gibson has observed as many as 20 rabbits loitering along McClurg Court, near East Illinois Street. She considers them bullies, and calls them “fuzzy rats.” “They’re practically man-eating!” she said. “They have no fear. They stare you down in your driveway.”
Some say the drastic situation calls for drastic measures.
Mary Zavett, 67, suggested selling the rabbits to local French bistros, for dishes such as rabbit ragout or rabbit etouffee.
The Park District opts to trap, and so far this year has relocated about 75 of the animals to the suburbs. But that has barely made a dent in the population.
There are areas in the city that remain rabbit-free: namely, the city’s rooftop gardens. No rabbits have been reported on the roof garden of City Hall or the third-floor garden at Lake Point Tower.
Madelen Fields-Gollogly, a member of the Grant Park Advisory Council, said the only reason the rabbits haven’t made it to the roofs is that “the rabbits don’t know how to push the buttons of the elevators.”
She and others worry that it’s just a matter of time.
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cmastony@tribune.com
