Easter Bunny and the Bilby
A rabbit plague destroys pasture a native marsupial endangered.
The common symbol of Easter the Easter bunny is being replaced by the Easter Bilby in Australia. The rabbit introduced by the first settlers became a plague pest whereas
Autumnal Easter in Australia is of course upside down. In the antipodes, instead of spring burgeoning and blossoming, gardeners prepare for winter.
Australians tend to head off for holidays at Easter to catch the last waves of summer and beaches are packed, as this is the last real break before the serious work of the year begins.
For schoolchildren, Easter marks the end of the first of four terms.
For them there is the excitement of hot cross buns and Easter eggs. Some Australians have a problem with the celebration of children’s Easter being linked to the Easter bunny – a spring symbol of fertility and fecundity. Too much fecundity.
The rabbit has been an environmental disaster in Australia and illustrates the environmental devastation that can be caused by careless importation of non-native species.
Rabbits were brought with the first fleet in 1788 when Australia was colonised as a convict settlement by the British and were kept captive for food. Sailors stocked islands with rabbits to supply them with fresh meat but the maddest release was made on Christmas day 1859 by Thomas Austin a landowner in Southern Victoria. Austin released 24 rabbits, 5 hares, and 72 partridges so that he could continue his favourite sport of hunting while in the colonies.
Other releases were made on other landowners’ properties and they even tried to legislate for rabbit protection.
The rabbit population exploded with few real predators and soon reached plague proportions. By 1950, there were an estimated 600 million of the beasts spread across Australia. They ate the grass the sheep should have had and the very squatters that released the pests suffered from denuded paddocks.
To halt the westward spread across the empty desolate Nullarbor Plain and into the rich grazing lands of Western Australia the government decided to build a rabbit proof fence. From Starvation Boat Harbour in the south, it ran for 1,833 kilometres to Cape Keraudren. By the time it was finished in 1907, it was already too late - rabbits had crossed the line.
The European fox was introduced – for sport - in 1845 and followed the rabbit. Foxes remain the bane of organic gardeners’ henhouses. Hares gnaw new trees that must be protected and rabbits (that have been partly controlled through the introduction of species-specific disease, the European rabbit flea and the Spanish rabbit flee) still have a fondness for our lettuces.
The World Wildlife Fund reports that rabbits are still an environmental disaster in one of Australia’s offshore Islands, Macquarie Island, where their numbers are such that they have caused landslides killing many penguins and endangering other avian wildlife.
Some Australians are very unhappy to have such an environmental disaster as an Easter symbol. A campaign to replace the rabbit with the bilby a type of bandicoot, a small marsupial (animal with a pouch) that is severely threatened by habitat degradation due to farming and grazing practises as well as predation by foxes as well as predators such as goannas and snakes has begun.
Organics? Organic gardeners support the concept of sustainability, preservation, and conservation through their farming or gardening practices. Not only is organics about not using or misusing inorganic fertilisers, herbicides, or pesticides but also the maintenance of a sustainable environment that does not export problems.
Fourteen million tonnes of pollution run off onto the Great Barrier Reef annually – ninety percent is from farms.
