I was watching this coyote late one spring day but couldn’t quite figure out what it was doing as it was mostly obscured in the tall grass. At first, I assumed it was hunting for voles, as I’ve seen other coyotes do in these fields. However, it kept carrying the animals it was catching over to one spot and then coming back for more. No coyote hunts voles that sucessfully, so then I thought perhaps it was ferrying its pups from one spot to another. When I saw it eat one of the animals it was carrying I knew it wasn’t carrying pups, and my third guess at what was happening turned out to be the correct one.

The natural world is a harsh one and one of the consequences is that some of my favorite creatures eat some of my favorite creatures. What I came to realize was that this coyote had found a den of rabbits and was catching all of the baby bunnies and storing them in a nearby cache, while eating a couple herself. I watched with mixed fascination and horror as the coyote bounded through the grass and landed on her prey, even as I could hear the surviving bunnies shrieking in alarm.

The coyote eventually came out of the tall grasses not far from where I was standing carrying one of the dead bunnies in her mouth. She might have have been taking the little rabbits back to feed her own, one mother’s children dying to feed another’s.