Emde- Shrum

Rabbits overtaking city park

CHICAGO -- Ravenous rabbits are putting a big-time bite on vegetation in Chicago's Grant Park, and city officials are trying to keep the rascally creatures at bay.

"We've never counted them, but there's thousands of them," Sloane Nystrom, deputy director of natural resources for the Chicago Park District, said Thursday.

Joel Brown, a University of Illinois-Chicago biology professor told the Grant Park Advisory Board on Wednesday that the rabbits have been drawn by park vegetation -- lawns, plants and the sap behind tree bark.

The advisory board is working with the city to develop a permanent, yet humane, solution to the rabbits, said board president Bob O'Neill. Officials are concerned that the rabbits might harm some 200 elm trees that are to be planted in the park.

The best way to protect the new elms would be to erect wire-mesh fences around the trees, then trap and relocate the rabbits, Brown said.

O'Neill said the city made such a move last year, capturing rabbits and moving them to the Cook County Forest Preserve. But the effort did little to stifle the spread of the floppy-eared critters.

"We're all trying to figure out why there are so many of them," Nystrom said of the rabbits. "Part of the reason may be that a lot of (recent) winters have been more mild, so they're not dying off in the natural way the way they used to."

Brown offered some mathematical reasoning for the problem: The bunnies have a 30-day gestation period and produce four to six rabbits per litter, with as many as four litters per season.

-- From wire reports