Rabbits and Wrens

I didn't have 15 of them, to be sure.  But when I looked out the front window after getting dressed this morning, I saw not one, but two rabbits out on the front lawn.  They weren't very large, so I assume they were still young.  But I saw them do something I don't think I've ever seen before: play with each other.  They would run toward each other, and then one would hop over the other, bouncing off its back as it sailed over and while they made a kind of squeaking noise.  It was really quite funny.

After a minute of that, they stopped and went back to eating dandelions, not fresh yellow ones, but old ones that had gone to seed, the kind you used to blow the heads off when you were a kid.  They bit them off at the base, so that the stems were sticking straight out of their mouths like a straw, with the heads at the end.  And then, phwoosh, in they went, nibbled right up--like a person sucking in a spaghetti noodle.  (Not that any of us would have such poor manners as to do a thing like that.)

Then later in the morning I was sitting at a desk reading when I noticed movement outside the bedroom window.  We have a magnolia tree in our yard, with a birdhouse attached to the trunk, where a pair of wrens has built a nest this year.  And a squirrel was trying to make his way up the tree trunk.  I have no idea whether a squirrel would molest a bird nest, or whether it just looked like a good tree to climb, but the parent wren--mother? father? your guess is as good as mine--was not pleased.  This tiny little wren repeatedly dive-bombed the squirrel, which must have been a dozen times it size, darting right at the squirrel's head and then fluttering back out of reach again.  Until it drove the squirrel away.  Quite a display of bravery and parental affection.