As a reminder that we all get limited time at the Shore, and things will continue after we are gone, I give you the tale of the rabbit. The consistent unwelcomed guest in your flower garden
They have been nibbling at the flowers and gardens in Sea Girt long before we were here. Walter Hinchman, (1845-1920) who summered at his brother Charles’s house “Sandown” at Philadelphia and the ocean, sketched the rabbits and wrote the following poem:
1915 drawing labeled “Sea Girt”
THE RETURN TO SEA GIRT MID-SUMMER, 1911
Though Sea Girt's sounding surge and rounded dunes abide,
And green are lawn and hedge, and meadows golden eyed,
Though bright the summer skies, and soft the south winds blow.
And birds in "shrubbish” hide, just as they used to do,
-- Alack! the garden's grace, which we were wont to laud, Is gone-
And, not by blight, all our best plants are gnawed!
For, in the neighb'ring shade b'rer rabbit has his lair,
And thence has made his raids upon our flowers fair.
The while, in our first rage on vengeance dire we think,
Our Groton brother comes, like Lowell's bobolink,
And with him and with her the garden smiles again,
Gurgling in ecstasy his sweet refrain,
Of "June! dear June!
Now God be praised for June.”
And with him and with her the garden smiles again,
Our angry thoughts are stayed. (Memo) The rabbits we will pen.
The poem was written upon his return from England to attend the wedding of his nephew (the Groton Brother) to a girl named June.
By this time Walter was 66, having served the Union in the Civil War. He also worked as a draftsman for Jonathan Dunn in Washington, D.C., and for the Patent Office. In 1867, he joined a surveying expedition that set out of St. Louis, Missouri to map the US southwest for the railroads. (His brother Charles was one of the most senior executives of the Pennsylvania RR). The expedition was ambushed by Indians and he spent two nights alone in the…He returned to the east coast via Panama and settled in New York City.
His neighbor Marriott Morris photographed this rabbit in 1905 at his father’s house called Avocado, the first home in Crescent Park.
Crescent Park, Edgemere, and the wide area around Wreck Pond gives refuge to fox and the occasional coyote. There are eagles in the area again. They all feed on the rabbits.
Rabbit hunters: Bald Eagle in Spring Lake, Coyote in Bradley Beach, Fox in Sea Girt
But not to worry. If the rabbits don’t get your flowers, the hungriest herbivore around is abundant in the verdant surroundings…our good friends, white-tailed deer.
