My last house bordered on a big undeveloped green space; we had , as we called them, 'owl years' and 'bunny years'. You could see the pattern clear as day and predict it to a certain extent. If there were a ton of bunnies out in our yard at dusk in the spring, the following year was going to be an owl year, ostensibly because the eating was real good. If there were hardly any bunnies out there, the following year was almost definitely going to be a bunny year because the owls moved on or starved over the winter.

But there was no balance, that's the weird thing. It was almost binary...but it wasn't directly cyclical. We would know by early spring if this was going to be one of those "we need to put fencing around every single flower and plant in our garden" years, or if there were enough owls around to eat all the bunnies and give our garden a break, but it didn't alternate in any pattern we could tell. We just had to wait and see how many bunnies we had out there at dusk. There were far more bunny years than owl years, but whereas in owl years you would hear them out there hooting all night long, in bunny years...nothing.

Tangentially...it was always a squirrel year. IDK if the owls didn't care for squirrel or what but only the bunnies and the owls were locked into this relationship...the chipmunks and squirrels were unaffected. The owls just really only wanted bunnies I guess lol.

Damn, that sounds like a retribution killing.

That's terrible for you and the squirrels but some apex predator's babies are getting really well nourished. Or it's also possible many squirrels noped out of the area after a few were devoured.