# BLUE wild rabbit urine??



## MiniHoofBeats (Mar 11, 2007)

I wish I would have gotten a photo but the snow melted and so did the color...I went out to my pastures the other day and saw some rabbit tracks around and some rabbit droppings, then I saw a bright blue urine spot, looked just like a snowcone! I said naw, no way...then looked around and found 2 more spread out in the




: pasture, all following in rabbit tracks and a few droppings. Then I looked just outside my pasture and saw a mixture of yellow and blue mixing into green, then one more green, then one more yellow as if a rabbit may have eaten something and was slowly working the dye out each time it urined...all following along rabbit tracks! Then horribly I found a chunk of rabbit hair as if it was bit and ripped off...poor thing...

anyone ever hear of this or see it before? At first I freaked out thinking someone was pouring blue window wash or something in by my horses but there were no human tracks anywhere, just a bunch of rabbit tracks!

It's all gone now but it still baffles me...


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## CLC Stables (Mar 11, 2007)

Are you sure you are not living by a nuclear reactor HAHAHA, it could be a Jack-Alope,you know a Jack Rabbit with Horns.

Seriously though, I have never heard of that but I would say it could be a sick rabbit, or like you said the processing of whatever it ate.


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## rabbitsfizz (Mar 11, 2007)

Either they have been eating too many out of season Blueberries or you have been eating too many magic mushrooms!!!!



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## billiethekid40 (Mar 12, 2007)

hmm, do you suppose thats how the easter bunny dyes all those eggs?



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## JO~* (Mar 12, 2007)

I found this??? Maybe it will help?

At my work, there is a recurring report from people tracking animals in the snow; a bizarre and lurid claim of blue rabbit urine. After six winters there, I have finally witnessed this first hand. Before seeing the blue stain on the snow myself, I was frankly skeptical, and assumed that people were seeing something else, and mistaking it for blue rabbit urine.

A quick search turns up one article on the phenomenon--posted by an "urban field ecologist," no less--from the previous winter. You can read it here: http://nuthatch.typepad.com/ba/2005/12/blue_smurf_pee_.html Another reference to this, with anecdotal experimental information is here: http://www.ont-woodlot-assoc.org/sw_nonfibre_redskies.html

The gist of it, is this: Our native rabbits (the eastern cottontail) have been browsing on an alien shrub (European buckthorn). The buckthorn contains a chemical that passes out with the urine, which comes out yellowish to brownish, but after exposure to sunlight, turns a lovely blue color. This effect is visible, of course, because the urine in question is suspended in snow. You would think that the cottontails are eating the berries of the buckthorn, because they are purplish, but according to the second reference above, the effect occurs after the rabbits eat other parts of the plant. Buckthorn holds its leaves long after most native deciduous plants, and in winter cottontails subsist largely on bark and twigs. The second reference also emphasizes that buckthorn is not a favored browse plant of North American herbivores, and that they have to be driven to feed on it out of desperation. I'm not sure about that; my workplace has enough Norway maple saplings to sustain a cottontail factory farm.


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## MiniHoofBeats (Mar 12, 2007)

Jo,

YES That is exactly what I saw in my pastures and right outside of them!! The first link has a photo and that is EXACTLY what I was trying to describe - blue stain like windshield fluid and rabbit turds!

Boy i'm glad i'm really not crazy



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Thanks so much for adding those links, I was so worried and frustrated that I didn't know what it was, and upset thinking someone may be trying to poison my horses or something! I'll have to go look up buckthorn...we did have a huge snowstorm last weekend and everything, shrubs and all, was covered and frozen over so I could imagine the rabbits turning to anything for food!

*phew!*


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