WHATTHEHECKWASTHAT?

This evening I was out mowing the hay-field that our lawn has become with the large amount of rain that has fallen recently. It's the first dry night in a long time - in all truth, last Monday evening was the last dry night that I can recall.

After I finished mowing with the lawn tractor, I got out the weed-wacker to finish up around the edges. As I was trimming an area under the kids' play structure, I was getting this fine gray stuff flying up. At first, I thought it was dead moldy grass, but something didn't look quite right about it. Then, all of a sudden...

WHATTHEHECKWASTHAT?!?!?!?

Something small and very fast came flying up out of the ground.

I turned off the weed-wacker and looked around. The grayish fluff was some kind of fur.

Hiding in the corner of the structure behind the climbing wall was a baby bunny. I was concerned that I'd hit it with the weed-wacker and injured it, so I picked it up to make sure that it was OK. I hadn't thought about baby bunnies making noise, but this one sort of squealed and grunted - a bit like a Guinea Pig. After a minute, it calmed down. The kids were very excited to see the baby bunny, but it had to go back into its nest. After putting the bunny back into the nest, we covered it back up with some grass clippings to help camouflage the area. There were several other siblings in the burrow. I later found out that mother rabbits pull out their own fur to line the nests to keep the baby bunnies warm. Hopefully 'mom' will be back this evening to take care of her brood.