Protecting trees from rabbits

A common difficulty that orchard-keepers run into is rabbits and hares eating bark from their fruit trees, especially during the winter. This can kill a fruit garden, undoing years of work and care. Common solutions are imperfect: if rabbits are hungry enough, they can get through a fence, or through tree protectors. And in the winter, rabbits are very hungry. Even a rabbit-eating dog can’t always keep them away, when the choice for the rabbits is between certain death of hunger and the risk of being eaten.

This dynamic can be described thus: the attractive strength of the presence of food is overwhelmingly stronger than the repelling strength of a predator. This equation is decidedly not in our favor. Even adding a fence and tree protectors can only delay the inevitable. So what variables can we adjust to arrive at an equation that is balanced in our favor?

The largest variable is the hunger of the rabbits. If you do nothing to alleviate this factor, the equation will remain the same. So how can you alleviate the hunger?

Another way to consider this question is: how can we give the rabbits what they want, without losing what we want? There can only be one way: Feed the rabbits. To do that, plant a border of trees around the fruit garden. Choose trees that rabbits like to eat, and that grow back from their roots in a multi-stemmed habit after severe pruning. And plant a lot of them. Some trees to try are plum, willow, aspen and hazelnut.

This will work for a while. The rabbits will eat the bark of the trees you plant at the edge of the garden, killing some of them. Some will grow back with multiple stems, giving the rabbits more food. Unfortunately, this won’t work forever, because having more food means that the rabbits’ population will grow. Also, if there is no significant sense of danger that the rabbits have when they are in your fruit garden, there is no reason why they shouldn’t start living there, inside the border of trees that you planted. In that case, they will be as likely to feed on your fruit trees as your other trees, defeating the purpose of planting a border of trees in the first place.

So there are two more elements that you need: a method of decreasing the rabbit population, and a method of making the rabbits afraid to spend to much time in your garden. Once these elements are in place, you have a system that will sustainably keep 90%-99% of your favored trees safe from rabbits. If you need them to be even safer, tree protectors are of course still an option.

To decrease the rabbit population, you can set simple traps made out of loops of wire, or you can hunt for them, or you can put up several tall wooden poles around your garden for hawks to hunt from. That last method requires a garden layout that leaves many open spaces without trees over them, so that the rabbits are forced to expose themselves to the view of the hawks. To make the rabbits afraid of your garden, you can play music or podcasts with human voices. But a simple solution that solves both the problem of rabbit population and the problem of repelling rabbits is a dog that chases and eats rabbits. Remember: this only works if the rabbits have abundant food sources other than your fruit trees.