Our Man In Paris: Rabbits enjoy life in the fast lane

In the midst of the snarling eight lanes of traffic circling Porte Maillot, in western Paris, there is a public garden that looks remarkably like Teletubbyland. It has formal paths, lawns and shrubberies, and even rabbit-holes. Ten minutes' walk from the Arc de Triomphe, at the heart of the busiest traffic junction in one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, there is a flourishing warren of wild rabbits.

In the midst of the snarling eight lanes of traffic circling Porte Maillot, in western Paris, there is a public garden that looks remarkably like Teletubbyland. It has formal paths, lawns and shrubberies, and even rabbit-holes. Ten minutes' walk from the Arc de Triomphe, at the heart of the busiest traffic junction in one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, there is a flourishing warren of wild rabbits.

As you sit in the jumbled, bad-tempered lanes of cars waiting to drive up to the Champs-Elysées or join the Paris ring road, you can see the rabbits skipping around a few feet from your wheels. The animals - black, brown, white or rabbit-coloured - are the descendants of pets dumped by Parisians over several decades.

At dawn, one day last week, we - the photographer Alistair Miller, my nine- year-old daughter Clare and myself - set out on a Parisian rabbit hunt.

We wanted a picture of a wild-but- sophisticated urban rabbit, with the Arc de Triomphe in the background. We saw plenty of rabbits, of different colours and sizes, but none that would pose in front of the Arc. Where is David Attenborough when you need him?

Shortly after we arrived at the traffic-girded gardens, we re-enacted one of the most celebrated scenes from the books of Beatrix Potter. Clare, armed with a carrot, was attempting to coax a large, black rabbit - aka Pierre Lapin - out of the bushes. The park-keeper - aka Monsieur MacGregor - turned up on his miniature red tractor pulling a miniature red trailer. He shouted: "Don't feed those things. They're a menace. They've been dumped here by the cretins who live all around... They eat up all my flowers. We're soon going to kill them all..."

The word that the park-keeper used for "to kill" was a very French, urban, non-Beatrix Potter word - "flinguer" - to gun down. The English slang equivalent would be "to waste" or "take out". Is this the end for the rabbits of Porte Maillot? Is Watership Down to be re-enacted in the midst of the City of Light?

Apparently not. Xavier Japiot, the man who runs the wild-animals department of Paris Nature, the city's environmental agency, assured me that there is no plan to "waste" the Porte Maillot rabbits. In any case, they are just a sub-tribe of a much larger population of genetically varied rabbits - thousands of them - that inhabit the Bois de Boulogne and the grassy embankments of the ring road, or boulevard périphérique. Almost all are descended from pet rabbits evicted from flats after they peed on the Persian rugs once too often.

Japiot believes that members of the Porte Maillot colony come and go, by mysterious urban rabbit trails, from the Bois de Boulogne. "We trap some of them from time to time, to keep the numbers down, but there is no intention of exterminating them," he reassured me.

How could such timid creatures adapt so happily to such a frenetic place - the equivalent of a rabbit warren at Marble Arch or Hyde Park Corner? "They have no predators and they feel safe there, as if they were on a real island," M. Japiot explained. "Hearing and alarm calls are vital to rabbits in the wild. At Porte Maillot, the rabbits can hear little above the sound of the cars. They have adapted by making more use of their other alarm systems, such as drumming their feet."

Rabbits are the least of his worries, he said. Parts of the Bois de Vincennes are overrun by the progeny of ex-pet gerbils. Lakes and pools in the Bois de Vincennes, the Bois de Boulogne, the Buttes-Chaumont and the Parc Monceau have colonies of abandoned tortoises and turtles. Some of them can be fierce and have been known to eat young ducks.

Ten different species of parrot have apparently been identified flying around Paris in recent years. Animals let loose recently in the Bois de Vincennes include a prairie dog and an Arctic fox. Several years ago, a pair of piranha were even found swimming in the charming Canal St-Martin, which wanders through eastern Paris towards the Seine.

"In Paris, people will buy anything and dump anything," Japiot said. There is, apparently, no danger of piranha breeding in the wild in France, but just don't trail your hand in the water the next time you take a ride on a bâteau-mouche...

SNCF goes off the rails

Leaves on the track. Frozen points. Trains cancelled. Trains late. Stations closed without warning. Can this really be France, the country that invented the train à grande vitesse (TGV), and likes to mock (understandably) the mess that Britain has made of its privatised railways?

France has a three-tier railway system. The TGV services are outstanding. The other main lines are good-to-mediocre. Paris's suburban network is unreliable (by French standards), less dense than the commuter lines south of London, and operated with ageing graffiti-covered trains.

The statistics are revealing, however. Just under 91 per cent of suburban trains in the greater Paris area this year have left and arrived on time (or within five minutes of the appointed time). This figure is regarded by commuters and politicians as disastrous. The SNCF, the French state railway, faces heavy fines.

In Britain, such a figure would be considered miraculous. The privatised suburban rail networks around London have an average punctuality of 75 per cent.

Corsicansÿ burning rage

The Corsican code of silence - which makes the Sicilian principle of omertà look garrulous - may be starting to crack up. After a holiday home was plastiqué (blown up) in the village of Poggio-d'Oletta last week, almost all of the residents joined a demonstration to protest against the outrage. They carried a banner that read: "Honte à certains", or "Shame on someone".