The eastern cottontail is one of Kentucky’s most familiar mammals, and its 1,092 records stretch across 93 counties, from the Louisville neighborhoods of Jefferson County through the Bluegrass to the cave country around Mammoth Cave National Park.
Built for the brush line
Cottontails live on edges, where open grass meets dense cover. They feed in the open but never wander far from a thicket, brush pile, or briar tangle they can dive into, since nearly everything that hunts in Kentucky hunts rabbits. The grassy field margins and wooded borders around places like Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park and the Land Between the Lakes countryside suit that habit well.
A spring and summer of litters
The calendar traces the breeding year plainly. Counts surge from April through July, when females raise one litter after another in shallow, grass-lined nests scratched into the ground, and each new batch of young is foraging on its own within weeks of birth. Winter counts run thin not because the rabbits leave but because they hold tight in cover, resting in shallow surface forms rather than burrows of their own and venturing out on mild days.
Status in Kentucky
NatureServe ranks the eastern cottontail S5, Secure, in Kentucky, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
