Drama in the driveway

I'd thought there must be a cat prowling through the garden with all the fuss the robins and bluejays were making. I went outside, flip-flop in hand (they're excellent flung at neighborhood strays) and found that the fuss was due to a red-tail on our roof. Strange, I thought. It flew to the black locust in the neighbor's yard and I watched it for a while and cheered the robins for their bravery in dive-bombing it.

An hour or so later the DH whispered, "Come here, quick!" from beside the kitchen window. The red-tail was back, this time on the ground, high-stepping through the grass beside the driveway. Hawks look so out of their element on the ground, don't they?

Then I noticed the tiny wriggling baby bunnies on the driveway. Three in all, spread out beneath my car, one in the shadow of a tire.

Hmmm. What to do?

Dutifully, bunny-lover that I am, I stepped out the door and the red-tail flew off to the neighbor's roof.

The nest had been dug weeks ago and then abandoned. Too close, I'd thought, to Luka's run of the yard. Looking inside it now, I found two newborn kits in the middle of a hastily covered scrape. Following the trail of newborn bunnies under the car, I saw the mother rabbit crouched beneath the transmission.

I returned the babies to their nest and wondered what had happened. Was the mother interrupted in her birthing by the hawk - does that explain two in the nest and three others spread out in the driveway? Had the hawk discovered the nest and the momma bunny caught in the middle of moving them somewhere safe? Was the hawk on the ground after the babies or the mother? Odd the mysteries that play themselves out if we're paying attention, I think.

I wonder if they'll survive, if the mother will come back to nurse them as she should. I wonder, too, that the red-tail won't come back.