Learn about Eastern cottontail rabbits

"That's no ordinary rabbit!" — Tim the Enchanter, Monty Python and the Holy Grail When King Arthur and his gallant knights encountered the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, they foolishly ignored the Enchanter's dire warning—"He'll do you a treat, mate."— and as a consequence they lost Sir Bors, Gawain and Ector to the "most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!"We'll forgive the Enchanter for referring to the rabbit as a rodent; he was under a deal of stress. And actually, until the mid-twentieth century, taxonomists generally classified rabbits and related species as a subset of the Order Rodentia, in large part because both groups possess continuously growing upper incisors. However since then, the 54-61 species (depending on the specialist you talk to) of hares and rabbits and 30 species of pikas have been separated off into their own Order, the Lagomorpha. Pikas, if you're unfamiliar with them, are smallish, round-bodied, short-limbed, stubby-eared, no-tailed mammals of mountainous areas in Asia and North America that look almost, but not quite, entirely unlike rabbits.However, an anatomical feature they do share with the rabbits, cottontails and hares—and one which differentiates them all from the rodents—is the presence of four (instead of two) incisors fronting their top row of teeth. The interesting bit in the above statement is that if you were to catch a rabbit with its mouth open, you'd only see two large incisors on top and another two on bottom. Working together, these serve as some of nature's most efficient shears for dicing up vegetation and stripping bark from young trees. But you wouldn't see the second pair of top incisors because they are reduced to twig-like stubs called "peg teeth" hidden in back of the large ones you do see. I've never heard a satisfying explanation of the possible value of these peg teeth. Perhaps they serve to reinforce the large upper incisors in their daily scissoring against the lower ones. Anyway, all the Lagomorphs have them.At this time of year, it's difficult to walk the dog through an open meadow without scaring up a half-dozen cottontails. Even my postage stamp of a backyard in town has its resident bunny. The Eastern cottontail, Sylvilagus floridanus, is the most abundant rabbit in North America. Readily identified by its reddish to grayish-brown pelage, long ears and hind legs and the fluffy white underside of its short tail, one or another of the Eastern's 18 subspecies (distinctive forms) is a common sight from Southern Canada to Northern South America. In the U.S. it is widely distributed throughout most the Eastern States and parts of New Mexico and Arizona. But as common as it is, the Eastern is only one of the country's 10 species of cottontails. Most of the others, as suggested by names like the Desert, Appalachian and Manzano Mountains cottontails, have specialized habitat requirements and distributions. The Eastern is more of a generalist and will be found feeding on grass, leaves, fruits, flowers and seeds in open meadows, overgrown fields, pastures, shrubland, suburban lawns and forest edges—indeed almost anywhere it finds adequate vegetation for foraging and cover to hide from its numerous predators.The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) that served as the model for Beatrix Potter's Tales of the Flopsy Bunnies and Peter Rabbit, as well as Richard Adams' novel, Watership Down, is a quite different animal from North America's cottontail.For one thing, while European rabbits dig burrows and commonly live in warrens of up to 30 animals, cottontails are solitary creatures that strongly defend their territories against others of their species. Although a cottontail may sometimes adopt an old groundhog hole in which to spend the day (they are typically most active at dawn and dusk), they more commonly nest above ground in "forms," shallow depressions they scratch into a clump of grass beneath a bush.At 3-6 pounds, European rabbits are also larger than our cottontails which seldom top 3 pounds. Then too, they breed like rabbits. While cottontails are no slouches as reproducers—females begin breeding at 2-3 years after which they average about 4 litters of 5 kittens per year—European rabbit females begin reproducing at 8 months, commonly producing 10-12 litters of 6 kittens per year.So cottontails are one thing, European rabbits another and hares are yet a further take on the bunny design. Unlike cottontails and rabbits which are born naked and blind, requiring their mother's attention for up to 8 weeks, baby hares (called leverets) are born fully furred with their eyes open and ready to leave the nest within an hour.Hares are larger than most rabbits and, as animals that typically live in wide-open spaces with little cover, a good deal faster. While a cottontail being chased by a fox can run a zig-zag pattern at 18 mph, snowshoe hares and black-tailed jackrabbits (a form of hare) have been clocked at 35 mph.A final trait that all the Lagomorphs share is a rather inefficient digestive system for getting at the nutrients in the plant matter on which they all forage. Their ingenious solution to the problem is coprophagy, re-ingesting of their first feces of the day to give their intestines a second crack at breakfast.