On a February day, there’s a fresh coat of snow on the ground. About four inches of new snow fell overnight, leaving the world bright and clean. The surface of the snow contains the records of last night’s activity. Every creature that was out and about left its tracks for us to see. Raccoons, birds, opossums, mice, deer, maybe a fox, and definitely rabbits.
While it’s still dark, the rabbits leave their hidey-holes under brush piles, fallen logs, and in the fence rows on Owl Acres to forage for food. In the daylight, they’ll return to their safe spaces, hunker down and wait till evening before they come out again.
Our rabbits are Eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus). They are native to North America and live from Canada to Mexico and the Atlantic to the Rockies. They’ve also been introduced in western states, so they’re more or less everywhere in the United States these days. They live in edge areas, where different habitats meet. For instance, on Owl Acres, they live in the woods near the open meadows, and at the edges of the nearby beanfields. They live in the overgrown brushy thickets of the fence rows. They also live at the edges of wetlands, suburban yards, and, yes, in the garden (just ask Peter Rabbit).
In spring and summer, rabbits eat grass, alfalfa, clover and legumes such as peas and beans. In winter they eat the woody parts of plants like the bark on young trees. This diet requires some significant adaptations for the rabbit.
First of all, rabbits are not rodents. They are lagomorphs (which basically means “rabbit-shaped”!) But they do have a characteristic similar to a rodent. Like rodents, rabbits’ teeth grow constantly throughout their lives. They have four incisors that grow continuously. Thus Bugs Bunny with his buck teeth. They need this constant renewal because they gnaw on woody plants and grasses which actually contain bits of silica. This gnawing wears down the rabbit’s teeth. The rabbit pulverizes its food with its molars and premolars, which also keep growing.
Extracting the nutrients from grass is well beyond most mammals’ digestive systems. Some, like deer and cattle, process it through multiple stomachs. the rabbits have another plan. They collect likely material in a pouch between the small and large intestines. There, with the help of specific bacteria, yeasts and other micro-organisms that are able to digest cellulose they turn it into sugar. They package it in soft moist pellets called cecotropes. Four to eight hours after they eat, they excrete the cecotropes and then immediately eat them. They then can digest the pellets in their stomachs and can get the nutrients out of them. Baby rabbits need that specific cocktail of bacteria, yeast etc. to digest their own food, but aren’t born with it in place. Instead, they eat their mother’s cecotropes and acquire it that way.
Did you ever wonder why rabbits have such long ears? They have acute hearing and can swivel those ears 270 degrees to capture sound. But the reason their ears are so long has nothing to do with hearing. Rabbits wear a coat of thick, soft fur, even on the bottoms of their feet. They have very few sweat glands, and, although they do pant through their noses, they need another way to radiate excess body heat in the hot summers of their habitats. Those long upright ears are loaded with blood vessels that expand when the rabbit is hot and radiate heat so they can cool down. In the winter, those blood vessels contract to preserve body heat.
Along with acute hearing, rabbits have an excellent sense of smell. They have as many scent receptors as a dog has. When they’re twitching their noses, they’re reading the world like a dog does.
The Eastern cottontail wears a coat of thick soft buff-colored underfur with an outer layer of coarser gray and black-tipped guard hairs. It’s rump and flanks are gray with a reddish patch on the nape of its neck. Underneath, its fur is white. This includes the puffy white underside of its short tail that gives it its name. The rabbit is from 15 to 19 inches long and weighs from two to four pounds. Along with its long (two to three inches), stand-up ears, the cottontail has large brown protruding eyes ringed in white and set high on the sides of its head. The eye position gives the rabbit almost 360-degree vision, very useful for a creature who is hunted by every meat-eater in the neighborhood.
Speaking of predators, the cottontail spends its life trying to avoid them. Escape is one strategy, The cottontail has strong hind legs and large hind feet, so it can jump ten to 15 feet at a time. It can also run up to 18 miles an hour. To throw off its pursuer, the cottontail will often run in a zigzag pattern that is harder for the predator to follow. In some predicaments, such as finding itself in the talons of a bird of prey, the rabbit may play dead, hoping the bird will drop it.
A cottontail’s life expectancy in the wild is short, with a mortality rate of about 80% per year. They are an important factor in the food chain. To compensate, they breed—like rabbits. A female rabbit can produce up to seven litters in a year, becoming fertile as soon as her current litter is born. About the time that litter is weaned, the next one comes along.
Photo by Ryan Hodnett