The eastern cottontail is one of Delaware’s most recorded mammals, 958 records spread almost evenly from top to bottom of the state, New Castle and Sussex Counties running neck and neck with Kent not far behind. That evenness is the point: wherever Delaware keeps a field edge, a hedgerow, or a brushy roadside, the cottontail is there.
Edge country, not deep woods
Cottontails live on the seam between open ground and cover, grazing grass and clover in the open but never straying far from briars they can bolt into. Delaware’s mosaic of farm fields, dune scrub at Cape Henlopen State Park, and the brushy margins of Bombay Hook and Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuges suits them exactly. They rarely dig their own burrows, resting instead in a shallow grass-lined depression called a form and borrowing other animals’ holes when the weather turns hard.
A long season of litters
The record climbs sharply in April and holds high through July, matching a breeding season that runs from early spring into late summer. A female raises three or four litters in that span, each in a fur-lined nest hidden in plain grass, and young rabbits from the first litters are abroad while the last are still nursing. Winter thins the sightings but never stops them; rabbits stay active all year, switching to bark, twigs, and buds when the green growth is gone.
Status in Delaware
NatureServe ranks the eastern cottontail S5, Secure, in Delaware. It is native to the state, USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous, and it carries no state-level conservation listing.
Full species profile
