With 2972 records, the desert cottontail is one of the most reported mammals in New Mexico’s atlas, and its map is nearly the whole state. The Rio Grande carries the heaviest line of records, through Rio Grande Valley State Park and Mesilla Valley Bosque Park, with thick clusters at Petroglyph National Monument and across the Chihuahuan Desert at Organ Mountains - Desert Peaks National Monument and City of Rocks State Park.
A rabbit that makes its living on dry land
The desert cottontail handles aridity better than most rabbits. It draws nearly all the water it needs from its food, grasses and herbs in good seasons, then cactus, mesquite, and other woody browse when the range dries out, and it escapes the worst heat by feeding at dawn and dusk. Rather than digging its own burrow it shelters in shallow forms or borrows holes dug by other animals, which lets it use open desert scrub with little cover.
Spring green-up, spring litters
Reports rise steeply to an April peak and stay strong through midsummer, the season when green growth returns and females raise successive litters in fur-lined nests scraped into the ground. Young rabbits on their first forays account for much of what spring observers see.
Status in New Mexico
NatureServe ranks the desert cottontail S5, Secure, in New Mexico, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
