Tag Archives: bunny

Loki’s Journey – A Rabbit’s Map

Loki's Journey - A Rabbit's Map

This is the third mapping experiment I have done for my research. I decided it would be interesting to map a living creature and how it behaves. So, with the help of a good friend, I took my rabbit Loki out of his hutch, put on his harness, and allowed him to run around the garden.

As my friend ran around the garden with him, following where he wanted to go, I observed and mapped out where he went. The dots represent spots where he stopped, and I labelled some of the ones where he did something other than just standing. It was interesting to note that some areas he actually designated for particular activities, such as digging, sleeping and grooming. The activity took us about an hour. He had a particularly fun time playing in the garden at the top left corner of the map, so we stayed there for quite a while. Funny how rabbits spend more time playing than sleeping.

I’ve labelled particular landmarks in my garden to give you a rough idea of where everything is. This is a pretty simple map, as I needed to be quick to keep up with Loki’s antics. He’s rather energetic for a bunny!

My inspiration for this map was animal tracking. I have a thorough love and interest in animals, and tracking their patterns is one of the most intriguing things ever. Animal tracking, and the maps made from those tracks, is an important social/biological experiment in order to keep track of animal populations in the wild and where they move to. I wanted to try and recreate this in my map, thinking about whether wild rabbits share the same traits as my domesticated rabbit has.