Dear Kid,
(Somehow, MFtI forgot to publish this this morning.)
Way back when you were in Jr High (I think it was when you were in Jr High), you or Pi (or possibly both of you) used a simulation software that looked at a prairie system. As I recall, there were wolves who ate rabbits who ate the tall grass which hid the wolves. And each group reproduced and consumed at a given rate so the idea was to find the right amount of grass, rabbits, and wolves where each of the populations would remain (more or less) constant.
I’m sure there was an important lesson in there besides “wolves eat rabbits” and “look how fast this thing calculates” but I don’t remember what the Important Lesson was. I hope you do. I have great faith that you gained something from our educational system.
The point is that we have something similar happening in our very own backyard.
You remember we had a fox more or less take a part-time seasonal home here this spring?
And you remember that the Puppy dug up a rabbit’s nest? (Maybe I didn’t tell you about that. He found the nest. He was very proud of himself. We quickly removed him and re-covered the rabbits.)
Sometime after the Puppy made friends with un-developed rabbits, we’re pretty sure the fox made dinner of them. And it’s possible that the tall grass (which is more not-grass than grass) was enough to hide him, but only if you were already on the other side of the house.
Yesterday, much to my joy, I saw a rabbit hoppity-ing through the backyard, stopping to eat the not-exactly-grass that grows where lawn should be.
I was about to celebrate our backyard as the perfectly balanced system when I realized I haven’t seen the fox in a while. Probably it moved on.
But possibly the rabbit studied Krav Maga.
In which case we’re going to have a lot of rabbits this summer…
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