Urban animal: fast and fluffy

The main focus of the Urban Animal series has been on birds. That doesn't mean that mammals haven't made the urban landscape their home. Some of these mammals are pets (mostly cats and dogs), other are considered pests (muskrats, mice, rats and moles), and a few are truly wild in the city (for instance bats, Stone marten, Hedgehog, Red fox and Red Squirrel). Another animal seen in -especially modernist- housing estates with large expanses of grass are rabbits. I see many of them especially at dusk or at night foraging on lawn and grass, even in the middle of a turbo-roundabout!

Seeing urban bunnies always brings a smile to my face. But to catch them on camera is quite another thing; these fluffy critters are fast! On occasion one sees a docile rabbit, but these are always escaped pets that are used to having people come up close. Feral bunnies also are typically lighter in colour or flecked. This statement about feral rabbits suggests that these animals are naturally wild, but they have been introduced anywhere outside of their natural range in Spain and adjoining Morocco.

Once you start looking carefully, urban bunnies are present all around Eindhoven! The can be seen just before dusk in grassland reserves amongst the family houses of housing estates (left). They can be found in those high-rise estates of the 1960s and 1970s that have a lot of grassland and other open space between the apartment towers and slabs (middle). And sometimes they show themselves in parks (right). There they are much rarer probably because of dogs.