RAISING RABBITAT

Rex Burress

Often I fancy seeing a cottontail rabbit dashing along the river, but it's usually a jack rabbit breaking cover. Just as fox squirrels are missing from the Feather River landscape, so are cottontails, whereas in my Missouri boyhood haunts, they were the two most abundant native mammals.

The Eastern Cottontail [Sylvilagus floridanus], or Peter Rabbit as you would know if having ever read Thornton Burgess' Little Bedtime Tales, are those soft-haired, big-eyed, long-eared, puffy-tailed vegetarians able to leap a tall bush with a single bound. As a brush-patch denizen on the farm, they were a source of neverending excitement, whether bursting from their hideaway in the grass or bounding away in the snow.

To the young outdoorsman, no day was too cold to follow their three-point tracks when the aim was to bag a few with the .22 rifle. Hound dogs were as eager to bawl after them on the trail as the hunter was to hear the yodel and watch the chase. Dogs had an addiction to follow an elusive creature they would seldom see and never catch, much to the annoyance of coon hunters at night whose hound pack was thrown off the target by rabbits. A good coon hound was not influenced by the lagomorphs. Most of those small mammals with two prominent front teeth are called rodents, but rabbits and hares are classified in the order of lagamorpha because of an extra pair of front incisors, longer ears, long legs, and a short tail. Hares, (Lepus) or jack rabbits, are further characterized by giving birth to precocial babies that are fully furred and able to run right after birth! Black-tailed jack rabbits are abundant around Oroville and go leaping away as if in wide-eyed terror, which is warranted for a tasty tidbit highly sought by nearly every predator. They were growing abundant in Blue Oak Meadow near the river until gray fox and a mountain lion discovered the surplus and quickly reduced them.

Tiny brush rabbits, that also have cotton-ball tails, can be found in places like Gray Lodge Refuge, but there too, they are highly prone to hawk predation

Rabbits and rodents both are the bread house of nature. They are vegetarians that often become food for numerous carnivorous creatures, but have a high birth rate to off-set the high mortality. Missouri Conservation Agent Jeff Berti, who used that term 'rabbitat' in reviewing MO cottontails, indicates a single female can bear about 35 babies during a single breeding season and many of her juveniles breed during the year of their birth.

Today, the biggest problem facing rabbits [and other wildlife] whether Missouri or California, involves changes in land use. Favored clovers and wild grasses have been reduced, field sizes have increased, brushy fencerows and idle areas have been “cleaned up” and herbicide use has been greatly increased. Without good “rabbitat”[brushpiles, brushy fencerows, and natural areas], small game will dissipate along with the entire web of life. Serious summer wildfires thus greatly reduce wildlife.

If you wonder whether a “Polar Vortex” is disastrous for rabbits in the eastern states, they are survivalists and will find shelter in groundhog dens where groundhogs are hibernating. Most animals are adapted for the climate they live in and can survive as long as they can find habitat-shelter and food.

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon

you have a dozen.” --John Steinbeck

“The fox wakes up in the morning and knows it will have to run faster than the rabbit to

stay alive. The rabbit wakes up in the morning knowing it will have to run faster than the fox to stay alive.”

--Rex Burress