Feral rabbits have taken over the grounds of an Anchorage elementary school

Evidence of an invasion surrounds the elementary school. Tiny footprints – much smaller than a child’s – zig-zag the property. Divots line the structure’s foundation. Pellets of poop stud the snow. Bushes are flattened, “mowed down” by animal mouths.

The culprits are a colony of feral rabbits. They tuck away as parents pick up their children at the Aquarian Charter School in Anchorage’s Spenard neighborhood. As foot traffic dwindles, several reemerge, some from hiding spots underneath the school’s building and nearby parked cars.

“Yup, it’s a thing,” said kindergarten and first-grade teacher Paul Campbell. “There’s not a second of the day that there’s not 20 bunnies zipping around out the window.”

School administrators say that a population of feral rabbits in the school’s neighborhood has exploded in the last year. Now they estimate the animals number between more than 50 and hundreds. Some are as big as small dogs, in black, brown, gray, and mixed colors. Others appear to be juveniles, with fluff for bodies.

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A rabbit tucks underneath an overhang near the foundation of Aquarian Charter School on November 13, 2024. Aquarian Charter School says it is dealing with an increasing population of feral rabbits on the school grounds and damage to its new landscaping improvements as a result. (Marc Lester / ADN)

The bunnies, everyone agrees, are cute.

But they are also distracting students, destroying expensive landscaping, attracting predators and multiplying, said school principal, Brittany Nerland.

After several failed attempts of keeping the rabbits away from school property — and warning neighbors not to feed them — Nerland is throwing up her hands.

“It’s comical at this point, we have to laugh about it,” she said, standing a few feet away from a palm-sized bunny and a recently-planted tree with its roots dug up.

“We need help.”

Populating like rabbits

Though it’s not the first time there’s been a feral rabbit outbreak in Anchorage, it is the biggest in recent history, said Joel Jorgensen, spokesperson for Anchorage Animal Care and Control.

Jorgensen said pockets of feral rabbits crop up in Anchorage every year, when owners who had bought the furry pets no longer want to care for them and release them into the wild. Normally, Animal Control advises Anchorage residents to capture invasive species — such as rabbits or cats — and bring them into the animal shelter, he said.

But the shelter doesn’t have capacity for 100 rabbits.

“It’s a hard solve,” Jorgensen said. “They are one of the most invasive species that we know of.”

Rabbits can reproduce starting at a few months old, experts say, and their gestational period lasts about 30 days.

“So it becomes a growing problem,” Jorgensen said. “It’s a fine balance between: How many (rabbits) can we actually physically take and keep in our building, and then what can we do to actually help the community with the nuisance.”

Aquarian staff’s creative attempts at deterring the encroaching rabbits have thus far failed — in part due to natural circumstances, in part because the rabbits seem to have human allies. Cayenne pepper around new shrubbery washed off in the rain. Live traps set earlier this year disappeared the next day. And warnings against feeding the rabbits haven’t slowed a daily dump of scraps.

“Folks aren’t being malicious,” Nerland said. “They’re not trying to cause anybody a headache. They just see these cute little animals, so they’re leaving food.”

On Thursday, freshly discarded carrots drew several rabbits along the fence to the east. Student council members have it on their agenda to make “don’t feed the rabbits” signs and post them on school property, Nerland said. The neighboring apartment building’s landlord sent a notice to his tenants, and teachers intervene when they see neighbors dumping food, she added.

“Somebody’s putting a lot of effort into, like, chopping up romaine lettuce, and throwing out carrots and timothy hay,” said school librarian Sharon Holland. “You’ll find piles of what I call Purina Bunny Chow….all over. So then the rabbits are like, ‘Oh, we’ve got a great place here.’ And then they just populate like rabbits.”

A real cost

The problem has become too big to handle on their own, Aquarian staff say.

“It’s just the sheer quantity,” Nerland said.

The school has contacted private trapping companies, but were quoted nearly $100 per day, per trap, Nerland said. But without professional help, Aquarian staff don’t know where to begin, she said: “Should we be trapping them? Hunting them? Teachers are strapped for time as it is, and now I’m going to ask them to go out and trap rabbits?”

The challenge comes with a substantial cost. The rabbits have destroyed the bulk of the charter school’s newly planted $100,000 worth of landscaping, part of its 2019 $6.8 million bond from the city for school repairs, Nerland said. They eat the vegetation and dig up the roots.

Three rows of bushes in the parking lot: dead. Bushes, plants and evergreens near the entrance: dead. Evergreens lining the back perimeter of the school’s property: dead.

“That’s a lot of money,” Nerland said, surveying the damage this week.

Then there are the academic-related nuisances.

“Just imagine teaching 5-year-olds reading. They look out the window, and there’s rabbits everywhere,” Nerland said.

Students have named the largest rabbit Big Papa. Another, they call Chocolate.

“It can be a little bit of a distraction when there’s these cute furry little bunnies hopping all over the place,” she said.

First rabbits, then foxes?

Feral rabbits can also introduce bigger threats, according to Cory Stantorf, the Anchorage area wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

“That can definitely cause issues by bringing in bears, coyotes, foxes, lynx, in the neighborhoods,” Stantorf said. “We’ve seen that in other parts of Anchorage...outside rabbits, then all the sudden, a fox shows up one day.”

People get nervous when predators start showing up around their kids and pets, he said.

Nerland said she and her staff have already had three run-ins with neighborhood dogs that entered the school property in pursuit of rabbits, once during recess.

“I laugh and I giggle, but really, it’s a good chunk of my day that I’m wrangling dogs and putting them in offices until Animal Control can get here,” she said.

Though Fish and Game doesn’t typically deal with feral rabbits since they’re considered “domestics,” Stantorf has a recommendation for Anchorage residents.

“(For) folks that don’t want to… raise a rabbit anymore, the best thing to do is to rehome them or turn them into Animal Control,” he said. “They do compete for food that our wild snowshoe hares need to survive.”

Currently, Animal Control is waiting on a green light from the city Health Department, which manages it, to set five or six live traps on the school property, which would be monitored by staff every four hours, Jorgensen said. They need approval to work overtime, he said, in order to check the traps regularly from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. They wouldn’t charge the school, and would bring in captured bunnies for a veterinary evaluation and adoption as they caught them, he added.

Nerland said she hopes it will prove to be the first effective remedy.

“My fear is that at the rate at which the rabbits are populating, five traps at a time, we’re not going to be able to eradicate them,” she said. “But it’s a start.”