I wandered into our back yard to tidy up after the latest windy afternoon and was pleased to find a wild daffodil blossoming beneath the trees. Hello, I said, because I talk to plants now like a come‐to‐life creature in lederhosen from some critically panned children’s book found on an end cap at the back wall of a dollar store.

The flower species was introduced to the Americas from Europe. It is most common in our part of the country to find it in the wild in Island County, and it is widely cultivated in Skagit County. Thanks given to whatever eddies of fortune carried the bulb of the plant to our garden where it has become a herald of spring, I went about my business.

Update March 2, 2025

The original daffodil has been joined by others. Although I am, the rabbits that gallivant through the yard are not interested in the daffodils, but they will doubtless show up in a couple of weeks to eat the tulips that are preparing to bloom in our flower beds. They are Eastern Cottontail rabbits (Sylvilagus floridanus), which were introduced to Washington state in the 1930s as a game animal and thrive in suburban environments such as this.¹ We are surrounded by invasive English ivy and Himalayan blackberry plants among which the rabbits seek cover and, although I keep those two invasive plants off our property, the neighbors may be inclined to disapprove were I to take up the eradication of these invasive rabbits.

In New Zealand, where virtually everyone wipes their feet before entering a forest, some cretin in Auckland in the 1990s illegally and deliberately released significant numbers of captive‐reared, non‐native rainbow lorikeets (birds, Trichoglossus moluccanus) that grew into a feral population, became a threat to the New Zealand horticultural industry, and took over 20 years to eliminate.²

In the United States beginning in the nineteenth century, carp from Asia were introduced to its waterways as food and, later, to clean commerical fish ponds. Today, having established themselves capaciously, they are known to be highly detrimental to the environment in parts of the U.S., with large state and national efforts underway to extirpate them from the Great Lakes and elsewhere.³

In 1935, 3,000 non-native, poisonous cane toads (Rhinella marina, formerly Bufo marinus) were released in the sugarcane plantations of north Queensland, Australia, in an attempt to control native beetles. By 2011 their population was estimated to number over 200 million, with effects that include the depletion of native species that die eating cane toads; the poisoning of pets and humans; depletion of native fauna preyed on by cane toads; and reduced prey populations for native insectivores.⁴ There is no evidence that they have affected the number of beetles which they were introduced to prey upon.

These rabbits in our yard never fail to remind me how mightily we are taxed by the misdeeds and miscalculations of others.