FRENCH AIRPORT FINDS ITSELF IN HOLE LIVING WITH 50,000 RASCALLY RABBITS.

Byline: Craig R. Whitney The New York Times

Charles de Gaulle Airport in this township just northeast of Paris handles 30 million passengers a year. About 45,000 people work at the airport, servicing and refueling planes, processing passengers on 1,000 flights a day, and loading cargo and baggage.

The airport's staff is outnumbered by its rabbits - as many as 50,000 of them, according to Jean Valissant, one of the two full-time gamekeepers the airport employs to try to keep from being completely overwhelmed.

``It's a rabbit paradise,'' Valissant admitted the other day on a tour of their domain - 5,000 acres of fenced-in short grass and cornfields lining the airport's two main runways. Electronic scarecrows emit scarifying noises to keep birds away from airplanes on takeoff and final approach, and incidentally from preying on rabbits.

That leaves the burden of rabbit population control on foxes.

Maitre Renard is clearly not up to the job. Roissy rabbits nest right up against the main terminal buildings, and burrow brazenly next to the runways, apparently aware by now that the big metal birds roaring past will never swoop down on them.

There are other solutions, one of which is to try to turn as many bunnies as possible into civet de lapin. So, this fall, the airport will resume rabbit hunts for selected guests with hunting licenses, but only in safely distant reaches of the grounds.

``The rabbits are quite healthy,'' said Joel Genty, the airport's environmental supervisor. ``They eat very well here, and their meat doesn't taste like jet fuel or anything like that.''

But even the hunts are not enough. ``If they burrow too close to a runway or a taxiway, they can undermine it and start a process of erosion that can lead to collapse,'' said Valissant, who added that they can also nibble holes in cables to landing lights. So, from time to time, he and his colleague call on the services of a ferreter to come and literally ferret the animals out of their burrows.

But it is still mostly a lost cause. ``We took 3,755 rabbits last year with nets and ferrets,'' he said. ``But if you come out here at 8 in the morning you'll see up to a thousand of them hopping around everywhere you look.''

He dodged between taxiing planes in a yellow-and-white airport patrol car toward one of the far runways. Fat rabbits nibbled placidly as a giant Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 came in for a landing. ``They're getting too close again,'' he said. ``Look at these ridges here - they look like a big piece of Gruyere.''

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Photo: The fight against foul at Charles de Gaulle Airportin Roissy, France, has opened the land up to rabbits.

The New York Times