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Has a critter ever lopped off your prized tulip so cleanly that it looked as if the pest used garden shears? You were probably victimized by a hungry eastern cottontail rabbit. In the summer, these pesky rabbits with their sharp incisors invade our gardens and lawns. In the winter, where do they go and what do they eat?
Eastern cottontail rabbits can withstand cold temperatures as long as they stay dry and avoid strong winds. They do not dig burrows (even though they are good diggers) and instead repurpose abandoned burrows, scratch out a shallow depression under bushes or claim a protected area beneath a porch or shed.
They do not hibernate, but spend much of the winter resting to conserve energy. They sleep about as much as people do – eight hours per day – but in short, 25-minute naps throughout the day and night. They pull their ears flat against their body to prevent heat from escaping through them. (In the summer, they raise their ears to cool off.)
In the fall, cottontails build up a layer of brown fat to survive the winter because the only food they can find when it’s snowy are plant stems, twigs, buds and bark, which don’t provide all the calories a rabbit needs. In less snowy winters, such as this one, cottontails can find some grasses, but low temperatures require them to burn brown fat anyway. (Brown fat also produces heat.)
Only about 30 percent of eastern cottontails survive an average winter. The population begins to rebound in March, when females give birth to the first babies of the year. A female cottontail can have three litters from March until September. Even though this sounds like a lot, more than half of newborns die within the first month. Coyotes, foxes, hawks and owls prey upon rabbits, especially baby bunnies. Only about 20 percent of all cottontails make it to their second year.
Eastern cottontails mate in mid-February. The female gives birth a month later. She digs a shallow depression to make a little nest and sits atop it to nurse. After nursing, she leaves the nest, covering it with grasses, leaves and fur. She returns, usually at night, to feed her newborns. Although she doesn’t nurse often, the mother is usually nearby, often about 20 feet from the nest, ready to charge at intruders, raking them with her long hind claws if necessary.
If a rabbit has placed a nest in your lawn, you (or your dog) may discover it. If you can, return any babies to the nest and keep pets away. The rabbits will soon abandon the nest: By about two weeks, baby bunnies can leave on their own; the mother weans them at about four weeks, and they soon disperse. These baby cottontails become adults in only three months!
About one-third reproduce their first summer, so late-summer babies could be the offspring of cottontails who themselves were babies only a few months earlier.
Eastern cottontails escape danger by stopping in place or by running in a zigzag pattern. When I ride my bike early in the mornings (this time of year in the dark), most rabbits I pass freeze in the grass beside the trail, but some hop right in front of my bicycle, zigzagging down the path ahead of me. Yet rabbits can run 18 mph if they need to.
You are most likely to see rabbits eating before dawn and after sunset. They also like moonlit nights. They’re herbivores who eat a diet similar to that of cows, though cows have more than one stomach and a long, complex digestive tract that gives their gut microbes plenty of time to extract all the nutrients from tough, fibrous grasses. Rabbits have short digestive tracts.
So how do they extract nutrients?
Well, first of all, rabbits chew their food like crazy. They can move their jaw up and down 120 times per minute. Rabbit teeth never stop growing, but they wear them down.
They swallow this well-chewed mass. After passing through the stomach and small intestine, small food particles take a side trip to a special chamber called the cecum. There the food ferments, allowing bacteria to break down the material into soft stools. Cottontails poop out and eat these greenish, mucus-covered blobs about four hours after eating. The mucus protects the blobs from stomach acids, allowing the fermentation to continue for a few more hours. Eventually, the mucus dissolves, and the intestines absorb the nutrients. (Rabbits are not the only animal that eats its feces. Rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, and chinchillas all share this distasteful habit, called coprophagy.)
Not everything a cottontail eats takes a side trip into the cecum. Large, indigestible fiber travels directly to the large intestine and passes out as hard, round pellets. You might see these hard pellets in your yard or garden if you have rabbit visitors. (I have such visitors nightly.)
Although Peter Rabbit’s father was put into a pie by Mrs. McGregor, today we fight our cottontail battles differently. One tactic to keep rabbits from eating our lettuces, French beans and radishes is to put up mesh wire fencing around the young plants. Because rabbits are good diggers, the fencing needs to be buried at least 6 inches into the ground.
If you have other good ideas for keeping rabbits from your veggies, let us know so we can pass the information along.
Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day, and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.
Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
The far left and far right of the background on the feature image to this post (not seen above) was generated digitally and is not real. The rabbit was photographed and is real.
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