Save the Bunnies!

At the townhome in Saddle Rock, deep in the Denver 'burbs, I share the landscape with golfers, the occasional fox...and bunnies. Lots of bunnies.

We have rabbits throughout the neighborhood, generally innocuous and admittedly cute little creatures, although some get annoyed that they really can't adorn their entries with flowers during summer season. Rabbits do munch a lot.

I hadn't thought too much about the bunnies in the neighborhood until a few weeks ago, when I was doing a little project in the basement. The main water shutoff is behind a door in the third bedroom - or at least it is now; it originally was a wood slab screwed into place, but a piano hinge and some ingenuity fixed that.

As I was cleaning up after yet another successful DIY excursion, I happened to glance out the basement bedroom window. It's a fairly deep window well, perhaps 5 or 6 feet, and it's topped with a metal grate with about 3" of space between elements of the grid. At the bottom of the window well sits a few inches of rocks, a few old leaves and the occasional brave plant that tries to eke out a living with only a few minutes of sunlight a day.

Oh. And bunnies.

Sadly, bunny remains. As my eyes resolved what I was seeing, I realized that the window wells' grates, while able to stop most animals from falling in, were sadly not built for a bunny fleeing a fox. Plop! It appeared that, months ago (by the looks of the fur that remained), about four bunnies fell into the window well and couldn't escape.

Very sad. Circle of life and all that, but still.

While I could do nothing for the bunnies that came before, I resolved that their deaths would not be in vain. I took a personal stand against bunny traps in basement window wells, and went in search of a solution. Which I found at Home Depot.

Plastic mesh inside my window wells saves the bunnies.

With a roll of 3/4 by 1 1/2 inch plastic mesh, some wire and a great deal of twisting with Channel Locks, I was able to line the inside of all my window well grates with a second layer of protection for the bunnies. They can now scamper across my window well gates to their little furry hearts' content, safe in the knowledge that the great Window Well Pit of Doom is no longer a threat to their floppy-eared lives.

Oh - and Home Depot also solved the bunny corpse cleanup problem as well, with one of those nifty long grabber thingys. I never had to get closer than about four feet from the poor dead bunnies. Another crisis averted!