A quick web search revealed that cottontails are indeed the common rabbit out here now, and what I thought I knew turned out not to be true. The guide had other introduced species like nutria, so up until that point I hadn’t much reason to doubt it. Come to think of it, though, it doesn’t list eastern gray squirrels or eastern fox squirrels as being out here either, and they’re both the common squirrels in the cities (and spreading ever further).
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Friend or Foe?
A cottontail pauses from its grazing to figure out if I'm friend or foe. I was kneeling down to get to eye level with it, and given my distance thanks to the telephoto lens, it decided I wasn't a threat. Cottontails can be pretty tame in some areas but this one at Huntington Beach State Park seemed pretty wary, perhaps having alligators nearby does that to you.
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Mouthful of Clover
This cottontail was happily munching away in a field full of clover at the Virginia Tech Duck Pond in Blacksburg, Virginia. In this picture, he's got his mouth stuffed full of clover.
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Outsiders
Many of the people who live in Oregon aren't natives (myself included), and that increasingly applies to our wildlife as well. One example is this eastern cottontail, a native of the East that is now common here in parts of the Northwest. Many references don't include Oregon and Washington as part of the range of this cottontail, which is confusing, as we do have several species of native cottontails that can be found in appropriate habitats and for a long time I didn't realize that many of the cottontails I was seeing out here were the same species as those I grew up with.
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