Montana’s 123 desert cottontail records belong overwhelmingly to the state’s dry eastern half. Carbon, Yellowstone, and Phillips counties lead the list, and the named settings read like a tour of the plains and badlands: First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, Makoshika State Park, and the Upper Missouri River Breaks.
A rabbit of brush and badlands
True to its name, this is the cottontail of arid country, at home in sagebrush, weedy draws, and rocky breaks where other rabbits thin out. It rests by day in a shallow form scratched under cover and borrows abandoned burrows rather than digging its own, feeding at dawn and dusk on grasses through the growing season and on bark and buds when snow covers the ground.
A summer of litters
Reports climb steeply from June through August and peak in late summer. Females raise several litters between spring and early fall, so by August the year’s young are out foraging on their own, and a rabbit bolting from a roadside draw is a common sight across the eastern prairie counties.
Status in Montana
NatureServe ranks the desert cottontail S5, Secure, in Montana, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
