Walter Faber, age 11, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for his question:
What are rock rabbits?
These little fellows, naturally, are not stone bunny statues. Neither are they made of candy. The name rock rabbit applies to a real live animal. However, it is not a scientific term and unfortunately it has become the common name of several very different animals.
We share our grassy world with dozens of different hares and rabbits and ordinary folk often confuse them. Our leaping, long legged jackrabbit is actually a hare. So is the furry footed snowshoe rabbit of the frozen north. The hares are not burrowing animals. Their nests are secret beds of grasses and their babies are born outdoors on the ground. They are well developed infants already equipped with furry coats and bright, wide awake eyes. The rabbits are burrowers and their babies are born in underground nurseries. The helpless infants are born blind and bare. But after a few weeks of care they are wide awake and fully clothed for their first trip outdoors.
Our cottontails are rabbits that build their community burrows in fields and marshes, in scrubland and desert prairies. Some of them live on stony slopes and the local people often call them rock rabbits. The rock hare is a red coated hare who makes his home in several parts of Africa. But the true rock rabbit is neither a hare or a rabbit, though he does enjoy life on the sunny slopes of rocky hillsides.
The furry fellow is about the right size and the right shape to be mistaken for a rabbit, but zoologists assure us that he is not. When they first investigated his features, they assumed him to be some kind of rodent, perhaps related to the wild, hillside guinea pigs of South America. But more detailed investigations proved this to be untrue. The furry little rock rabbit is not related to the hares or rabbits, the guinea pigs or any of the other rodents he so closely resembles.
Of all things, the little mammal is remotely related to the rhinoceros and the whopping elephant. But his features are so different from those of his giant cousins that zoologists have awarded him an animal group all his own. The rock rabbit is classed in the Order Hyracoidea. His everyday name is the hyrax. His native home is Africa, where he suns himself on the rocky slopes of Algeria, Libya and Southern Egypt. His relatives also are at home in Arabia and Syria and all the way down to rocky hillsides in South Africa. He is a sociable fellow who shares life with a colony of 50 or 60 friends and relatives. They breakfast at daybreak and dine at sundown on a vegetarian diet of leafy greenery.
The average hyrax has soft brown fur with a creamy patch in the middle of his back. He has small mousy ears and his face has a set of stiff, mousy whiskers. His tail is too small to mention. The toes on his short stubby legs have miniature hoofs that help him scramble safely over his sunny rocks. Those strange little feet also are useful for climbing trees. When there are woods in his neighborhood, the so called rock rabbit is quite at home high in the branches.