HABITS OF COTTONTAIL RABBITS.
Cottontail rabbits (fig. 1) are so well known that little need be said of their habits. They breed several times each year during the warmer months, the litters averaging five or six young. The nest is usually placed in a hollow or depression of the ground, often in open fields or meadows. It is composed of dead grass and warmly lined with fur which the female pulls from her own body. The male rabbit takes no part in caring for the young, and the female weans them as soon as they are able to leave the nest. These animals breed so rapidly that in spite of many natural enemies, and of the fact that they are hunted for human food, they often become numerous enough to inflict serious losses on farmers and fruit growers in many parts of the United States (fig. 2).
Cottontail rabbits eat all sorts of herbage—leaves, stems, flowers, and seeds of herbaceous plants and grasses—and leaves, buds, bark, and fruits of woody plants or trees. They usually prefer the most succulent foods, as young shoots, tender garden vegetables, clover, alfalfa, and fallen ripe fruits; but they exhibit also a remarkable delicacy of taste in their selection of certain varieties of cultivated plants and in their neglect of others of the same species. Prof. C. V. Piper reports that in Oregon rabbits ate Arabian alfalfa down to the ground, while they did little or no damage to other varieties grown in surrounding plats. Prof. C. A. Mooers, of the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station, reports similar observations in regard to their taste for soy beans, stating that they greatly relish the mammoth yellow variety and that it is practically the only one that suffers from their depredations. When favorite foods are absent rabbits resort to whatever is available. It is during summer droughts or when deep snows cut off ordinary supplies that the animals attack the bark of growing trees or shrubs.
Fig. 1.—Cottontail rabbit in its "form."