TGVG Blog

Moonlit Dance: The Eastern Cottontail Rabbit

The Great Outdoors | March 6, 2023
eastern cottontail rabbit

By Jackie Scharfenberg, Retired Forest Naturalist

It’s late! I gotta hop or another buck will get my doe. Not a doe deer, but an eastern cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus) doe.

After chasing away any other bucks, we will dance our special dance together. I love the way her short brown/gray, black-tipped fur glistens in the moonlight while her white undersides and fluffy tail just glow. Between March and September, we repeat this dance three or four times.

Mating

Twenty-eight days after mating, does give birth to a litter of one to 12, but usually five, nearly hairless, blind, helpless kits. They measure about four inches long (the length of an adult’s thumb) and weigh roughly an ounce. Before birthing, each doe creates a form – a hidden shallow saucer-shaped depression in the ground that she lines with soft grass and her own belly fur. She nurses her young only two times each day for about ten days. The kits grow quickly and leave the nest after 12 to 16 days. They become independent at four to five weeks old, and disperse at seven weeks. Less than half of the kits will make it to their first birthday.

Diet

With our constantly growing front incisors, we devour many kinds of green plants during the warm seasons. Our diet sometimes makes humans a bit perturbed with us. In the winter we nibble on thin tree bark, buds, shrub ends, and even our vitamin-rich droppings. We use our front paws to bring an item into reach, but we eat on all fours using our noses to adjust our food in front of our front paws.

Survival

So many animals think we make a tasty meal including: hawks, owls, foxes, coyotes, wolves, bobcats, rattlesnakes, minks, fishers, weasels, skunks, raccoons, and humans. With all of these predators, we use special adaptations to survive. We can rotate our large, erect ears like a satellite dish to catch sounds from all directions. By twitching our noses 20 to 120 times each minute, we expose many of the one million scent receptors as possible to sniff out danger. Our protruding eyes allow us to see almost in every direction except directly in front of us.

We search for food under the cover of the lowlight at dusk and dawn (our preferred time) or darkness of night. If a predator approaches, we first freeze or slink low to the ground with our ears back, hoping to avoid detection. If one gets too close, we take off in a flash – zig-zagging fast (up to 18 miles/hour) and leaping a maximum of 15 feet towards cover like a trail through thick brush. In desperate situations we will fight off a predator by biting or kicking with our powerful back legs.

If you see a small cottontail in your yard, remember we are on our own at a very young age and are very nervous animals.

It is best to leave us alone. If you handle or try cage us, we may die from the shock alone. On a moonlit night, look outside. You may see one our beautiful mating dances.

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