Hopping Across Wyoming –
You’re a jackrabbit in this wide-open land and life is good.
What little rain that fell on the prairie this summer trickled off the highway and made the grass fresh and green. And so you eat. You twitch your little nose, find small puddles along the edges of the roadway and you drink too. The full moon rises and romance is in the air, not so much because of the moon but because, well, because you’re a rabbit.
Later, after a social evening that would make even polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs blush, you’re exhausted. The black asphalt roadway has retained the day’s heat and, with the late-summer night cooling quickly, you hop out and lie down on the warm, soothing road for a nap.
In the distance, somewhere down the highway, a pair of bright lights appear. They’re getting closer. Perhaps the glowing orbs are the eyes of yet another cute female rabbit hopping your way. Maybe you’re going to get lucky again.
Maybe not.
Highway 59 is a two-lane rope of asphalt that rolls across the flatlands of northeast Wyoming and slices through the Thunder Basin National Grassland. These days, the road is littered with the bodies of rabbits that have paid dearly in their quest for the green grass, water and warmth the roadway provides.
In a stunning and not-for-the-squeamish 112-mile stretch of highway running between Douglas and Gillette, a tally by a reporter (and you think your job has some weird aspects) showed more than 3,000 dead jackrabbits and cottontails scattered along the road.
“Sometimes when you drive that road at night,” said Wyoming Department of Transportation executive Tim Stark, “there’s a regular rhythm to it. You hit several of them every minute. It’s steady. Thump, thump, thump.”
On a recent sunny morning, some particularly grisly 1-mile stretches contained as many as 70 rabbits – rabbits that were definitely at the end of the line when they were handing out the lucky feet.
The critters are mostly the white-tailed jackrabbit, scientific name Lepus townsendii, and the black-tailed jackrabbit, or Lepus (we are not making this up) californicus, that can weigh as much as 9 pounds. A splatter … uh, smattering of smaller desert cottontails completes the gruesome roadkill buffet that attracts coyotes, foxes and birds of prey to the long, black dining table.
The reasons for the bunny carnage begin, experts say, with a spike in the rabbit population that has overwhelmed the Highway 59 area for the past two years. The number of rabbits naturally booms and busts. Vern Stelter of the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish called the current period an “extreme peak.”
“A high density like we’re seeing is always followed by a dramatic drop, usually because of disease,” Stelter said. “Right now we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it like this.”
Robin Kepple, a Game and Fish spokeswoman who lives and works in Casper and is familiar with the fluffy fur highway some 40 miles to the east, said the green grass along roadways creates even more rabbits.
“They gather along the roads because of the grass, and when they have plenty of food like that they start breeding like rabbits,” she said.
She laughed.
“I guess that’s where the phrase comes from,” she said.
Along with their Wilt Chamberlain-like fornicating prowess, the rabbits don’t help themselves with their middle-of-the-road sleeping habits, according to Stelter.
“When a truck is coming they sometimes don’t even get up. Let me say this about rabbits – they’re not all that smart.”
But they do know how to find food. And water. Which also contributes, to use the old expression, to their population numbers “flattening out.” Because before humans run over the rabbits, they first lure them out of their prairie hideouts in a strange and unintentional way.
Rumble strips.
The strips are grooves cut into the pavement along the shoulders of most Wyoming roadways, grooves that rattle your tires if your vehicle begins drifting off the road – in many cases when motorists leave “The Greatest Hits of John Tesh” in the CD player too long and become groggy.
“Even a little bit of rain collects in those grooves,” said Game and Fish spokeswoman Kepple. “I’ve seen lots of prairie dogs drinking water out of those rumble strips. Rabbits are more nocturnal, and I bet they do the same thing at night. The come to the roads because they need that water.”
Because after a night filled with their typical activities, a rabbit could sure use a drink. Or a cigarette.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
