For many years, I have referred to every rabbit I see as Mr. Bun. I have no idea why but do know that this year I have been seeing more Mr. Buns around my fair city and its surroundings. They are sprinting across roads, hopping through yards (ours included), gallivanting in parks, flitting in fields, and skittering into smeuses. They’re eating garden vegetables, getting squished by cars, and getting eaten by other urban residents of the furred and fowl kind.
Curiously, no one has surveyed the population (of Mr. Buns, not us) to see how many little lagomorphs dwell amidst us or why they seem to have proliferated this year, as well as periodically in the past. One researcher I corresponded with told me that he and other local scientists suspect that the burgeoning bunnies have not taken over city wide. Instead, they seem to proliferate in one or a few neighborhoods and then, like any urban hipster, move on to new grounds, after wearing out their welcome.
Said researchers and others have proposed various theories for the intermittent population booms. Some blame it on religion: an excess of Easter bunnies, initially given as a gift, which morphs from cute to the gift that keeps on giving, resulting in guerrilla releases of the surfeit Mr. Buns into city greenspaces. Others point to our penchant for converting yards to bunny-feeding salad bars generally lacking in predators. Climate change could also contribute; a mild winter or two might enable more breeding for longer periods of time with the consequent booming bunny population. Then there are coyotes, who are no strangers to eating Mr. Buns; they thrive in Seattle and probably play a role in limiting the rabbit population.
Clearly, it’s not clear as to why the population of bunnies in Seattle has exploded this year. Or has it. The perceived increase could merely be that Mr. Bun and their progeny are out and about more or that I live in a neighborhood where religion, habitat alteration, climate change, and predator abundance have combined to boost our bunny numbers.
What we do know though is that Seattle’s rabbits are not from around here. Washington has five native species in the Leporidae family. East of the Cascades are Nuttall’s cottontail (Sylvilagus nuttallii), white- and black-tailed jackrabbits (Lepus townsendii and L. californicus), and pygmy rabbits (Brachylagus idahoensis). In the mountains are snowshoe hares (L. americanus). The San Juan islands, in contrast, is home to the other non-native, the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). Washington is also home to another member of the order Lagomorpha, the pika (Ochotona princeps), the well-known and well-loved, lithic-living mammal of the high mountains (generally).
The Mr. Buns we have in Seattle are eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus) and they arrived in the Puget lowland in 1927. In that fateful year, Charles D. White, manager of the King County Game Farm in Auburn obtained 24 cottontails from Kansas, which would be raised for future hunting purposes. (As a 1928 Seattle Times article noted, cottontails “furnish targets for the younger generation of sportsmen.” At the time, the paper printed a twice weekly column of sportsman’s gossip. Did sportswoman not gossip?) After 13 of the Kansas bunnies died from eating cabbage, bunnyman White released the remaining 11 to fare as they might and fare thee well they did; by the next summer their progeny had spread to Enunclaw, Kent, and Sumner.
If it’s okay, I’d now like to split hares and dive into the language of bunnies, rabbits, coneys, jackrabbits, and such. Turns out that rabbit is one of those words with more questions than answers, primarily as to its origin, which in the words of scholars is uncertain or unknown. Perhaps rabbit comes from the Hebrew for copulate, on account of their fecundity; or maybe from Robert, or from the Walloon, or other northern European. Either way, rabbit has been popular since about 1400.
Another idea is that rabbit might have developed simply to refer to the young animal, from the French use of -et or -ot for the diminutive. An adult “rabbit” was once known as a coney. (Young rabbits are called kits and a litter is a kindling.) Etymologists like to point out that coney originally rhymed with honey but now rhymes with bony. The reason is the original coney (rhyming with honey), which even made it into the Bible, developed connotations not used in polite company.
Long before the rise of rabbit, hare was the term for such an animal. From a scientific point of view, hare refers only to animals in the genus Lepus, such as our snowshoe hare, and not to other genera, such as Sylvilagus. You’ll note from above that the two Washington state jackrabbits are Lepus; all jackrabbits are hares but not all hares are jackrabbits and, no jackrabbit is a rabbit. According to Dr. Andrew Smith, co-author of an authoritative text on lagomorphs, pikas make up about a third of the total number of species in the order Lagomorpha, hares and jackrabbits are another third, and rabbits, such as cottontails, the final third.
The word jackrabbit is a newcomer, originating, most likely, in the nineteenth century American West. Not surprisingly, the word has an auricular origin, from the resemblence of the ears of the hare to the ears of the jackass. Thus, initially jackassrabbit, which shriveled in the arid landscape to jackrabbit. Like all hares, jackrabbits are born precocial, meaning with hair and open-eyed, in contrast to altricial cottontails, born blind and hairless. But what about Mr. Bun, you ask? It’s also newish word. Bun comes from Scottish dialect and originally referred to a squirrel and didn’t become associated with rabbits until the middle 1800s. I am so glad I live in an age when it does.
Given the present state things of Mr. Buns and their progeny, I suspect that Seattle will continue to be home to many an eastern cottontail, as well as many other non-native animals and plants. While some may discourage and condemn these newer members of the Seattle community, they do make the city more interesting, provide joy for some, and food for others.
Word of the Week - Smeuse - According to Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, where I learned of smeuse, it is a dialect term from Sussex and refers to a “gap at the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal.”
September 20, 2025 - Clima Incognita: Planning For An Unknown Climate – Jaipur Literature Festival: Seattle – Town Hall – 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM – I will be in conversation with author John Vaillant (Fire Season, a brilliant book) and Brinda Sarathy (professor and Dean of the University of Washington: Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences). Should be fun and interesting, along with the rest of the festival.
