Bunnies
The area rabbits felt much the way we did about the Mountain House Adventure Foods, and as soon as we started cooking, a bunch of them started running around the camp site. There were a ton of bunnies around Three Mile, and they didn't seem at all afraid of humans. I suspect the bunnies around Three Mile eat very well.
This brings to mind an ongoing saga I've been reading about Isle Royale for several years now. (I commented about this about five years ago in three posts starting here.) For about a half-century, Isle Royale was the subject of a moderately famous, long-term study examining the predator-prey relationship between the island's populations of moose and wolves. Isle Royale was a particularly good place to maintain that sort of study, because it's an island, where everything is contained within a 206-square-mile bottle. But the bottle proved too small (and too exposed to outside influences) for the predators to survive an introduced disease and its long-term consequences, and by 2016 or so, the population of Isle Royale wolves had fallen to two old and sickly animals. Those two wolves have since died.
This left Isle Royale without any predators, and you know what that means. They population of prey animals has exploded. The Isle Royale moose population -- which during the mid-1990s was down around 500 -- is close to 2,000 now, and that's too many moose for an island this size. And the moose aren't the only prey around. Nobody that I can see is tracking the island's rabbit population, but we had at least five rabbits stalking our one little campsite. There are a lot of rabbits on Isle Royale.
I should note, though, that the National Park Service introduced a new batch of wolves to Isle Royale a couple of years ago. The scientists weren't able to continue their annual winter study of the wolves in 2020 thanks to the Plague, but they estimate that there are about 14 wolves on the island right now. These wolves are likely eating very well.
Bunnies
The area rabbits felt much the way we did about the Mountain House Adventure Foods, and as soon as we started cooking, a bunch of them started running around the camp site. There were a ton of bunnies around Three Mile, and they didn't seem at all afraid of humans. I suspect the bunnies around Three Mile eat very well.
This brings to mind an ongoing saga I've been reading about Isle Royale for several years now. (I commented about this about five years ago in three posts starting here.) For about a half-century, Isle Royale was the subject of a moderately famous, long-term study examining the predator-prey relationship between the island's populations of moose and wolves. Isle Royale was a particularly good place to maintain that sort of study, because it's an island, where everything is contained within a 206-square-mile bottle. But the bottle proved too small (and too exposed to outside influences) for the predators to survive an introduced disease and its long-term consequences, and by 2016 or so, the population of Isle Royale wolves had fallen to two old and sickly animals. Those two wolves have since died.
This left Isle Royale without any predators, and you know what that means. They population of prey animals has exploded. The Isle Royale moose population -- which during the mid-1990s was down around 500 -- is close to 2,000 now, and that's too many moose for an island this size. And the moose aren't the only prey around. Nobody that I can see is tracking the island's rabbit population, but we had at least five rabbits stalking our one little campsite. There are a lot of rabbits on Isle Royale.
I should note, though, that the National Park Service introduced a new batch of wolves to Isle Royale a couple of years ago. The scientists weren't able to continue their annual winter study of the wolves in 2020 thanks to the Plague, but they estimate that there are about 14 wolves on the island right now. These wolves are likely eating very well.