Oddities of nature

Reading this forum title triggered a memory - something I hadn't thought about in years - but at the time it happened I was quite shocked and a bit spooked.
It was late February' and a friend from work and I had used our one day a week off to drive down to Isabel Pass about 150 miles south of Fairbanks, Alaska to hunt Ptarmigan. We only had a few hours of daylight at that time of year, so we had hunted hard and both limited out with our 15 birds apiece, stopped at Summit Lake lodge for a bite to eat and say hello to Dave and Jacki Lanni who were the owners, and headed home. By that time it was already black dark, and as we were driving north through the pass, there were snowshoe rabbits or Hares everywhere as they were at the high point in their cycle. In some places the road was actually bumpy with all the road killed ones and I kept noticing that in some places there would be 2 or 3 sometimes 4 or 5 live rabbits around a dead one. Being real tired, I didn't pay much attention to it at first but it was happening so often that it finally got my interest and I asked Frank to stop the truck the next time we saw this happening. I got out and looked, and sure enough the live ones had been eating the road killed ones. It kind of shook both of us because we had always thought that all rabbits were strictly herbivores. There were so many of them at the high point in their cycle that they had eaten most of the available forage and had turned to cannibalism.

All I can think about, is Monty Python and the Holy Grail... "He's got fangs! He'll bite your head off!"

My uncle watched a deer eat a road killed groundhog.

I don't think there's an animal out there that won't eat meat once in a while. I seen cows eat small birds on my uncle's dairy farm. I've read about deer doing the same.
I think it's when they are lacking something in their diet that they find a source for it and eat it.

gregj said:

I don't think there's an animal out there that won't eat meat once in a while. I seen cows eat small birds on my uncle's dairy farm. I've read about deer doing the same.
I think it's when they are lacking something in their diet that they find a source for it and eat it.

Click to expand...

What those rabbits were lacking was just plain food. The snow there in the pass was at least 15 ft. deep and the willows that were sticking up had the bark stripped off as high as a rabbit could reach standing on their hind legs. You could see the browse line both sides of the road as far as you could see. They had eaten them selves out of house and home and were starving.
It's interesting, to walk through those areas in the spring, after the rabbits have reached their population peak. When the snow has melted, you can see white - dead rabbits laying all over the place. They get some disease that almost wipes them out and only a few survive to start the cycle over again.