The black-tailed jackrabbit is one of Arizona’s most widespread and visible hares, an open-country animal built to see trouble early and outrun it. Open occurrence databases hold 2,289 Arizona records for the species, 1,925 of them iNaturalist photos, a large tally that fits a hare people actually encounter along desert roads and refuge loops.
A hare of the open ground statewide
Unlike its southern-restricted cousin the antelope jackrabbit, this species turns up nearly everywhere in the state. Pima, Maricopa, and Cochise counties hold the most records, but the animal ranges from low desert basins into the mountains, thinning at elevation but rarely absent. The common thread is openness with a little shade: creosote and saltbush flats, mesquite grassland, farm edges, and the wide margins of washes and roads. Because it grazes low plants in the open rather than hiding in a burrow, it is one of the easier desert mammals to actually watch.
When and why it shows
Records climb through spring, when green growth pulls jackrabbits out to graze and daytime activity rises, and the animal is most active at dawn, dusk, and through the night. It digs no burrow, resting instead in a shallow form scraped beneath a shrub, then breaking into a bounding, direction-cutting run when a coyote or bobcat drifts too close. Those tall, black-tipped ears do double duty, catching danger early and shedding body heat so the hare can stay active across hot flats.
NatureServe ranks the black-tailed jackrabbit S5, secure, in Arizona, and rightly so, though local numbers swing hard between wet-year booms and drought-and-disease crashes. Saguaro National Park, the Grand Canyon, and Prescott National Forest are all easy places to find one stepping out to feed at the day’s edges.
Full species profile
