We first saw the backyard bunny one evening last summer. “Quick, look!” I hissed at my kids, pushing them out the door to catch a glimpse of the little brown-furred creature nibbling a dandelion—body stock-still, mouth twitching furiously. We watched in hushed silence. It was a wild creature, one we’d never seen before, right there in our yard.

I grew up in downtown Toronto and don’t remember ever seeing urban rabbits as a kid. Our next-door neighbour—an Italian grandmother who has grown bunny-friendly vegetables in her garden near St. Clair and Dufferin for 50 years—had never seen one either. But that summer, the backyard bunny became a constant presence, reliably popping up in the alley or a neighbourhood yard at dusk. It disappeared over the winter, worrying us all, but by April it was back, its distinctive footprints visible in a dusting of early spring snow.

And then, suddenly, rabbits were everywhere: a tawny body hopping down the alley in Roncesvalles; two eyes glowing in my headlights after an evening basketball game at Dovercourt Park; a cottontail out of central casting in my in-laws’ Annex backyard on Easter Sunday, the first they’d seen in 30 years.

“Have you noticed more bunnies lately?” I began asking, casually at first, and with increasing urgency as the weeks wore on and I succumbed to what I now recognize as the early stages of a kind of rabbit mania. I posted photos of the various bunnies I’d seen in group chats. I asked about the rabbit situation on social media. Had anyone else noticed? There were more bunnies in Toronto, weren’t there?

“There has to be more,” my brother-in-law Daniel texted from Bloor Street West, explaining that he never used to see them and now he spent most days with a rabbit, sometimes two, sitting directly in his line of sight. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind. “On two different Discords I’m on, people are talking about all the bunnies they keep seeing.”

“Just about everyone seems to have a bunny these days and there were none in my childhood memory,” a high-school friend I hadn’t spoken to in a decade DM’d me from her home in Etobicoke. “I never saw them as a kid and now I see them all the time,” another friend messaged from the east side.

To be clear: these sightings, while affirming, were not scientific. And The Local is committed to data journalism. Last year we spent months calculating life expectancy rates between different neighbourhoods, and we have, on more than one occasion, consulted a giant map of every single tree in Toronto. So while my friend Jacqueline’s observation—that “there were zero bunnies” when she was a kid and “now there are two” and “my evidence is very scientific because I live next to the elementary school I went to”—was compelling, it simply wasn’t enough. I wanted hard rabbit data and a scientific explanation.

The city’s bunnies had entranced me. They were adorable and wild—creatures that seemed to materialize out of the urban landscape, eat a leaf or two, and then melt back into the city. Surely someone out there had noticed them too, and could provide me with the empirical evidence I needed to justify my growing obsession.

But while my friends and neighbours were seeing bunnies everywhere, the experts I spoke with either weren’t paying attention or refused to acknowledge any change.

“I’m trying to answer a simple, maybe dumb question,” I began writing to various conservationists, wildlife experts, city employees, and other professionals who had better things to do with their time. “Are there more rabbits in Toronto than there used to be?”

“We do get frequent inquiries this time of year for wild buns despite being a domestic rabbit rescue,” said the head of Rabbit Rescue, her weariness apparent through the screen. “I don’t track wild bun concerns.”

The experts at the Toronto Zoo didn’t have any information. A group of master gardeners said they weren’t aware of a swell of rabbit-related complaints. The conservation group Ontario Nature weren’t any help, suggesting I “could do an online search to see if any information is available,” as if I hadn’t spent the previous week googling every single permutation of rabbits + Toronto + population increase.

“That is so funny that you ask me that,” wrote Tiziana Gelmi Candusso, an academic who uses motion-detection technology to record wildlife in Toronto’s ravines. She had her own backyard bunny, and had been curious herself, but unfortunately she’d recently turned off her cameras.

The executive director of the Toronto Wildlife Centre was blunter with her assessment of my query. “We are not counting rabbits, and I can’t imagine anyone else is either. From our perspective, nothing seems different in the rabbit world.”

She added, pointedly: “I do get this question pretty much every year once the babies start leaving the nest and are more visible.”

“I appreciate the response!” I responded, with false cheerfulness, choking back the urge to tell her that, in fact, I had begun seeing my backyard rabbit last year, not this spring, and so had a lot of my friends—and even some high-school classmates on Instagram I barely knew anymore—so any implication that I was just another idiot excited about seeing a spring bunny was pretty out of line.

But still. It gave me pause. Was it possible the apparent rabbit boom was just the same three creatures popping up over and over again in my circumscribed loop around my corner of west Toronto? As I put my compulsion into the world, and people began responding by texting me their own rabbit photos and tagging me in their posts, had I created my own deluded little bunny bubble?

I brushed the idea aside. “No,” I thought, with a swelling sense of unearned conviction. “It’s the wildlife people who are wrong.” I just needed to go much, much deeper.

The Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) is a lagomorph, an order the fossil record dates back to the late Palaeocene epoch about 56 million years ago. Lagomorphs, which include hares and rabbits as well as pikas, their adorable round-eared cousin, are one of evolution’s success stories—nibbling grazers with extraordinary fecundity who today inhabit every continent on the planet other than Antarctica.

But eastern cottontails weren’t always in Toronto. They arrived in Southern Ontario in the mid-19th century, following the human colonizers who were transforming the landscape. They’re an animal that thrives in the borders between wilderness and human development, grazing in meadows and retreating to cover when danger arrives. “Cottontail rabbits can do quite well in urban and suburban areas,” explained John Litvaitis, a renowned rabbit expert and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, after I bothered him. A leafy Toronto neighbourhood, with its mix of lawns and hedges, would be the perfect habitat.

And yet… the Hudson’s Bay Company data intrigued me. While the government didn’t care enough to monitor the populations of rabbits, the Hudson’s Bay Company did, in its own way. Established in 1671, the company kept meticulous records of its fur trades, accidentally creating one of the greatest long-term studies of animal populations ever recorded.

When scientists dug through the numbers, they noticed a distinct pattern. Rather than predators and prey keeping one another in relatively stable balance, their numbers oscillated wildly in a pattern of boom and bust. Snowshoe hare populations would peak one year, followed closely by swelling lynx populations, and then hares would plummet, followed by lynxes, and so on and so on, in an unending series of peaks and troughs.

Toronto’s rabbits aren’t snowshoe hares, but they seemed close enough to me. And looking through the newspaper archives, one story jumped out at me: a piece from the Toronto Star noting an “explosion” of cottontails in 2008. The story quotes an expert from the TRCA, who attributed the boom to ideal spring weather and the rabbit’s natural breeding cycle, which the expert put at every 7-8 years. I quickly did the math. If 2008 was a peak, then 16 years and exactly two breeding cycles later brought us to 2024—the very year I’d first seen my backyard rabbit.

I quickly emailed Professor Rudy Boonstra, a retired U of T academic who my contact at the Toronto Zoo had suggested. He phoned me back moments later, as if he’d been sitting at his desk on-call for any rabbit-related queries. “It’s Rudy Boonstra calling,” he said in a tone of crisp professionalism. “You asked me about the Eastern Cottontail.”

I tentatively laid out my theory. Rabbits, as we know, have cyclical breeding patterns. And 2008 was the last recorded peak. Was it possible that we were witnessing a cottontail boom in Toronto today?

He stopped me. “The cycles that you’re referring to are the snowshoe hare cycles,” he said. “And I’ve worked heavily on those from about 1974 onwards.”

I realized, far too late, that the Hudson’s Bay Company data studies I’d been eagerly paraphrasing over the phone all had the same co-author: Rudy Boonstra.

The snowshoe hare population, he explained, was driven by predators, specifically the lynx. It just didn’t apply to an urban rabbit. So while the idea that cottontails breed cyclically had become standard wisdom, cited by the TRCA and reported by the media, Boonstra didn’t see it. “I don’t think that’s the explanation for these guys here,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any evidence for them cycling.”

With that, my hope of finding an easy explanation fizzled. It had taken Boonstra an entire career to begin chipping away at the question of snowshoe hare fluctuations. What hope did I have of explaining rabbits in Toronto?