THE UBIQUITOUS BUNNY
(Page 3 of 7)
Adult cottontails will eat nearly any type
of vegetation found in their environment, including your
crops.
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And so the association of an egg-bearing hare with an
important religious holiday comes clear at last (sort of ):
The springtime fertility rites of pre-Christian Celts,
centering around the hare and his lady friend Eostre,
provided these ancient folk with an important sense of
long-term security-just as the biblical account of the
resurrection decreases angst for Christians today with a
promise of eternal life. Difference was, the Celts were
petitioning their deities for the renewal of the natural
world in the form of children and the replenishment of the
crops and creatures critical to the people's sustenance . .
. while the Christian celebration offered (and offers) its
followers hope, not for the rebirth of nature, but
for personal immortality in a world above and
beyond the natural.
Across the European centuries, these two ideologically
divergent springtime observances came to share the same
date and name, and somehow survived in parallel, even
though one remained stringently religious while the other
gradually entered the realm of children's folklore. When
German emigrants came to North America in the 1700s, they
brought the tradition of the Easter hare and his eggs along
with them. Eventually, through the provincial
idiosyncrasies of our language, the hare got transformed
into a rabbit, while his eggs were stuffed into a basket
for portability.
To summarize the secret life of Peter Cottontail, then, it
came to pass that out of the ancient Celtic honoring of
Eostre and her pal the hare, hopped our own Easter rabbit
with his basketful of eggs. And the Easter rabbit, in turn,
provided inspiration for "Peter Cottontail," the giddy
little ditty that brings so much joy to the wee folk this
time of year.
You'll wake up on Easter morning and you'll know that
he was there, when you find those chocolate bunnies that
he's hiding ev'rywhere.
Of course, it doesn't take a pagan to see how the bunny
came to be regarded as one of the ancients' most potent
fertility symbols; everyone knows that lagomorphs breed
like . . . well, like rabbits. Consider, as a particularly
pregnant example, old Peter's clan, genus
Sylvilagus, the cottontails (including swamp
rabbits, marsh rabbits, brush rabbits, forest rabbits,
pygmy rabbits-plus eastern, western, New England, mountain,
and desert cottontails as well as four other species, for a
total of 14).
The cottontail is native to, and ubiquitous across, the
Americas, ranging from east coast to west, and from
southern Canada on the north to as far south as Argentina
and Paraguay. Of the 14 species, the eastern cottontail (S.
floridanus) is the most plentiful, claims the
greatest range (all 48 contiguous states plus), and is the
archetypical white bummed bunny that most of us envision
when we say "cottontail."
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