There was an emotional early Easter surprise for one Falmouth family when their pet bunny returned a year after being given up for dead.

Sisters Indie, 12, Alicia, 10, Olivia, 7, and Una, 5, were overjoyed when pet Snowy returned to their garden a year and a week after he disappeared during the storms which ravaged Cornwall last February.

Following weeks of searching, mother Frances and her partner Tamsin had given up hope of finding Snowy, but just weeks before they were due to move house she looked up from washing-up to see the lucky white rabbit hopping down the garden path at her home in Tresillian Road.

She said: “I dismissed it at first thinking I’m a little tired, I look away and then back again and this rabbit is further down our path.

“I went straight outside in my slippers and dressing gown and looked at this rabbit in complete disbelief thinking this surely can’t be Snowy, not after all this time. I crouched down and called him and he hopped a little closer.

“I picked him up and he instantly went floppy and didn’t try to get away, as if to say I’m home, safe and I can relax.”

Frances said her pet had been in “a bad way”: no longer white, his fur |was matted, covered in faeces and riddled with fleas, his nails were overgrown, and he had suffered an injury which had turned his left eye an opaque grey-white.

She said she “couldn’t praise Rosemullion Vets enough” after he was cleaned up and given eye-drops and antibiotics, although she was told that he will be permanently blind in one eye.

She said it was “quite impressive he survived,” and added that it was fortunate that he returned when he did, “otherwise some random person who moved in here would come and see |a rabbit.”

The girls, who attend Penryn College and St Mary’s School, had been thinking about writing stories about his adventures over the last year, as Una said she thought he had gone to America, and Olivia thought maybe Disneyland.

When she first thought that Snowy had died, Frances had told the girls that he had gone to a nearby field to “find a girlfriend” and start a family, “which”, she added, “might be true.”

Alicia said she was “happy” and that it was “nice to groom him again,” and Una added that he “feels safe and loved.”