More often heard about than actually seen, the Eastern cottontail spends its life trying to be invisible — which is exactly why so many people only notice it when they nearly mow over a nest.

The Eastern cottontail is the rabbit most people in Montclair are picturing when they say “a rabbit in the yard.” It is common across nearly every kind of edge habitat in town — lawns, hedgerows, community gardens, the margins of parks — and it is built almost entirely around staying hidden rather than around fighting or fleeing very far.

What they look like

Cottontails are small, compact rabbits, typically 14 to 17 inches long and weighing 2 to 4 pounds. Their fur is a grizzled brown or grey-brown above, paler underneath, with the namesake tail: a puffball of white visible mainly when the rabbit is already running away. Large, upright ears help them listen for danger long before it arrives, and powerful hind legs are built for a fast, zigzagging sprint rather than sustained speed.

Family life

Cottontails breed prolifically. A female can have three to four litters a year between February and September, with two to seven kits per litter after a gestation of about a month. The nest itself is a shallow depression in the ground, lined with dried grass and the mother’s own fur, often sited in perfectly open lawn rather than anywhere obviously sheltered.

The mother is deliberately absent for most of the day. She visits only briefly, usually at dawn and dusk, to nurse — staying away otherwise so her own scent and movement do not draw attention to the nest. This is normal cottontail behaviour, not neglect, and it is the single most common source of well-meaning but unnecessary “rescues.” Kits grow fast: their eyes open within about a week, and most are out of the nest and independent by three to four weeks old.

Found a nest in your lawn? See our answer on protecting a rabbit nest from dogs and other predators for what to do — and what not to.

Daily habits

Cottontails are most active at dawn, dusk and through the night, spending the hottest part of the day resting in dense cover. Rather than fleeing long distances, their main defence is freezing perfectly still, relying on camouflage until a threat gets close — then bursting away in an unpredictable zigzag that makes them hard for a pursuing predator to track.

They are herbivores, grazing on grasses and clover through the warmer months and switching to twigs, bark and buds once snow covers the ground. A cottontail also re-ingests some of its own soft droppings, a digestive habit called coprophagy that lets it extract more nutrition from tough plant material — unusual to see, but entirely normal.

No burrow of their own

Unlike groundhogs or foxes, Eastern cottontails do not dig their own burrows. They rest above ground in a “form” — a shallow depression scratched out under a shrub, brush pile or dense groundcover — and will use an abandoned burrow dug by another animal only occasionally, mainly to escape severe weather or a determined predator.

Territory and range

Cottontails favour edge habitat: the transition zones between open lawn and dense cover, where they can graze in the open but duck to safety within a few hops. A single rabbit’s home range is usually small, often under a few acres, and is shaped far more by the availability of good hiding cover than by any need for open foraging ground.

A short life at the base of the food web

Very few cottontails live past their first year. They are a primary prey species for foxes, hawks, owls and other predators, and their high reproductive rate exists precisely to offset that pressure. A healthy population of foxes, hawks and owls in Montclair depends in part on a healthy population of rabbits — removing rabbits does not make a yard more wildlife-friendly, it removes a food source those other species need.

Living alongside rabbits

• Fence young or prized plantings, not the whole yard. A 2-foot fence of chicken wire with mesh no larger than 1 inch, buried a few inches into the ground, keeps cottontails out of vegetable beds without excluding them from the rest of a yard.
• Protect young trees and shrubs over winter. Cottontails gnaw bark in the cold months when other food is scarce. A cylinder of hardware cloth around the trunk, extending a few inches below ground, prevents girdling damage.
• Choose rabbit-resistant plants for open borders. Strongly scented or fuzzy-leaved plants — lavender, catmint, ornamental alliums — are reliably left alone, and work well as a border for beds a rabbit would otherwise browse.
• Leave brush piles and dense shrubs where you can. That cover is exactly what keeps rabbits — and the predators that rely on them — using a yard in a low-conflict way, resting and hiding rather than needing to range further for shelter.
• Mow with a quick check first. A cottontail nest is a shallow, grass-covered patch that is easy to miss. A brief look over the lawn before the first pass of the season protects a nest most people would never otherwise notice.

Planning plantings that hold up against browsing? See our guide to designing your yard for coexistence.

What neighbours have tried

• “We found a nest right in the middle of the lawn, three feet from where the dog runs every morning. We just started clipping him to a lead for a couple of weeks and staked a little wire dome over it during the day. Worked fine — they were gone within a month.”
• “I nearly mowed over a nest I never would have spotted otherwise. Now I always do one slow walk of the yard before the first cut of the season.”