Bunnies in the Backyard

I guess the title says it all. We have bunnies in our backyard. And I don't mean the proverbial backyard, I mean our fenced in backyard. The one our golden retreiver calls home.

Now we have always known that bunnies come and visit us and munch on the clover in our grass. We see them quite often. Shala (the golden, pronounced with a long 'a') loves to chase them out of the yard, and does so frequently. Most of the time they live across the street in a small green belt.

This is different. One of the mother bunnies decided that our backyard was a good place to raise her babies. Maybe it was the week of vacation we took and lack of canine activity that lured her to our yard.

My wife did see a bunny digging in our yard before we left, and I had seen evidence of digging just outside our fence. We didn't think much of it.

Two days ago I let Shala out back to take care of business and she walked around the side of the house. I followed thinking she was going to bark at our neighbors again and I would have to try to keep her quiet. Strangely she started pawing at the ground near our fence. When I pulled back the dead grass laying near where she was pawing I found two baby bunnies and their eyes weren't even opened yet.

Yesterday and today the mother bunny has been hanging around the yard or just outside the fence. We see her at times sitting directly over her babies, apparently feeding them.

We have since put up a barrier so that Shala can no longer get to the part of the yard with the babies. It should be fun to watch them start hopping around, which I can only guess will be very soon. My two kids (4 and 2) want to see the bunnies every chance they can. My wife and I limit the viewings to once or maybe twice a day.

In the second picture you can just see the nose and eye of one of the babies coming out of the ground just in front of the mother. Click on the small versions to see larger images.

The picture of the mother rabbit above was taken from a second story window. I removed the screen and stuck the camera out the window. The camera was a Canon 5D with a 70-200 2.8 L IS USM with a EF 2x II extender. I set the camera to 400 ISO to keep the shutter speed at 1/25 second with the aperature at f5.6. With the Extender I lose two stops of aperature (2.8 - 5.6). The Image Stabilization (IS) helped keep the image sharp even though I was hand holding at 1/25.

The picture of the babies was with the 5D and a 24-70mm 2.8L USM at 63mm. 1/125 at f5.6. I cropped the picture to highlight the babies. I like this lens because it has macro focusing capabilities which came in handy in this case.