a bevy of bunnies

What is going on in with rabbits?  They're everywhere.  It seems like I first started noticing them when I became, well sort of a north sider.  I threw in that 'sort of,' because I can't quite bring myself to directly call myself a north sider.  I feel like I am being a traitor to the land of my youth, like I have left the bungalow belt of Gage Park for the glittering north side with all those bars and restaurants and streets with exotic names and a whole fan of diagonal streets.  I still make a yearly trip to the old neighborhood, and I make excursions to Chinatown, Pilsen, Hyde Park (the south side does seem to have more distinct neighborhoods while the north side is all pretty much the same), but most other times when I leave the house I am heading north.

And you know what I see a lot of on the north side?  Rabbits.  I first remember noticing them walking from my mother's retirement home to the Ten Cat.  On this lawn, on the edge of that gangway, over by those bushes, standing flat dab in the middle of the lawn and staring openly at you with no fear, a bevy of bunies.

The thing is I don't remember them growing up in Gage Park.  As kids we certainly would have noticed rabbits.  The bungalow yards are not that expansive, but there were vacant lots, there was that whole stretch of wilderness along the railroad tracks west of St :Louis.  There were snakes.  At some point we discovered that the prairie by the tracks was full of garter snakes, and then we realized that our own lawns were full of them, and they could be caught by young boys and stored in coffee cans, but really they didn't make very good pets so we lost interest in them pretty soon.  And of course there were squirrels aplenty, but no rabbits.

I lived downstate for about twenty years, a much more rural area with much bigger lawns, and no bunnies to speak of, likewise the two years that I lived in Texas.

I don't know if it's a north side phenomena, or something to do with time, conditions that may have become more favorable to rabbits living in urban areas, and I just happened to have become 'sort of'' a north sider in the meantime.  Or maybe the whole thing is in my head.

I went to the google with is the rabbit population growing in Chicago and I got a whole pageful of articles.  I suspect if you google anything you will get a pageful of whatever theses you are entertaining, but here's one article I found: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/urban-rabbits-bunnies/BestOf?oid=27092070