When variously coloured rabbits are set free in Europe, and are
thus placed under their natural conditions, they generally revert
to the aboriginal grey colour; this may be in part due to the
tendency in all crossed animals, as lately observed, to revert to
their primordial state. But this tendency does not always prevail;
thus silver-grey rabbits are kept in warrens, and remain true
though living almost in a state of nature; but a warren must not be
stocked with both silver-greys and common rabbits; otherwise “in a
few years there will be none but common greys surviving.”[20] When
rabbits run wild in foreign countries under new conditions of life,
they by no means always revert to their aboriginal colour. In
Jamaica the feral rabbits are described as having been
“slate-coloured, deeply tinted with sprinklings of white on the
neck, on the shoulders, and on the back; softening off to
blue-white under the breast and belly.”[21] But in this tropical
island the conditions were not favourable to their increase, and
they never spread widely, and are now extinct, as I hear from Mr.
R. Hill, owing to a great fire which occurred in the woods. Rabbits
during many years have run wild in the Falkland Islands; they are
abundant in certain parts, but do not spread extensively. Most of
them are of the common grey colour; a few, as I am informed by
Admiral Sulivan, are hare-coloured, and many are black, often with
nearly symmetrical white marks on their faces. Hence, M. Lesson
described the black variety as a distinct species, under the name
of _Lepus magellanicus,_ but this, as I have elsewhere shown, is an
error.[22] Within recent times the sealers have stocked some of the
small outlying islets in the Falkland group with rabbits; and on
Pebble Islet, as I hear from Admiral Sulivan, a large proportion
are hare-coloured, whereas on Rabbit Islet a large proportion are
of a bluish colour, which is not elsewhere seen. How the rabbits
were coloured which were turned out of these islets is not known.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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