The Loss That’s Killing the West’s Wildlife
When Jon Gallie awoke in his Washington home to find his phone brimming with texts and voicemails, he felt dread. The Pearl Hill Fire had exploded overnight, and would soon destroy dozens of buildings in Douglas County. Gallie’s messages, however, didn’t concern his property. They were about his rabbits.
Gallie, a biologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, is tasked with stewarding the the smallest rabbit in North America, and one of the rarest in the world. is an unpretentious creature, a grapefruit-size ball of beige fur that spends its life nibbling sagebrush and cowering from hawks. In the late 1990s, the rabbit’s population crashed, compelling scientists to eventually capture the survivors and . Today, several hundred rabbits
