With 2,601 records across 88 counties, the eastern cottontail is one of the most-recorded mammals in Indiana’s atlas, running from the restored prairie at Kankakee Sands to the dune grasslands of Indiana Dunes National Park and the fields around Pokagon State Park. It is a rabbit of edges, and Indiana, a patchwork of farms, towns, and woodlots, is mostly edge.
A rabbit of brushy edges
Cottontails live where open feeding ground sits within a few bounds of dense cover: old fields, fencerows, brush piles, and overgrown ditch banks that put them out of a hawk’s reach. They eat grasses and clover through the warm months and switch to bark, twigs, and buds in winter, a shift that lets them hold their ground all year without roaming.
Breeding through the warm months
Indiana’s counts surge from April through July, the heart of a breeding season in which one female can raise several litters. Each litter is born in a shallow, fur-lined nest scraped into open grass, and the mother returns only briefly at dawn and dusk to nurse, a habit that keeps the nest nearly scentless to prowling predators. The deep winter dip in reports is no migration or dormancy. Cottontails stay active all winter, simply sitting tighter in cover.
Status in Indiana
NatureServe ranks the eastern cottontail S5, Secure, in Indiana, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
