Eastern Cottontail Gallery

A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

I grew up in the east, so when we moved to Oregon, I studied my field guides to learn what new wildlife I’d be seeing when out on the trails. My Audubon guide for mammals said that the rabbits we had out here were brush rabbits, so for years I assumed the rabbits I saw were brush rabbits. But one day I picked up a list of the wildlife at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge and it listed cottontails as a known species on the refuge, not native to the Northwest but here nevertheless. I went back to my guide wondering if I had missed something, but there was no mention of cottontails out here.

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).

Eastern cottontail in the grass near the trailhead of the Kiwa Trail at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

Eastern cottontail on the trail to the observation blind at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

Eastern cottontail at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina

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.

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.

An Eastern cottontail browses on grass near the headquarters of William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge

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.