The eastern cottontail is one of the most recorded mammals in Michigan’s atlas, with 4,594 records. They gather heavily in the southern Lower Peninsula, led by Washtenaw, Oakland, Ingham, and Wayne counties, but the map runs north to Marquette on the Lake Superior shore, wherever brushy cover meets open grass.
A rabbit of edges, not deep woods
A cottontail makes its living in the seam between cover and open ground, grazing clover and grasses in the open and bolting into brush piles, hedgerows, and sumac thickets when danger comes. Michigan’s southern farm and suburb mosaic is nearly ideal, which is why places like the Kellogg Biological Station’s old fields and the grass-and-shrub margins of Pinckney Recreation Area and Rose Lake State Wildlife Area hold so many records.
Spring means litters
Cottontails stay active all winter, switching from green forage to bark and twigs under the snow. The steep climb in records from April through July matches the breeding season, when a doe can raise three or four litters in a summer and young rabbits start appearing in yards, parks, and field edges across the state.
Status in Michigan
NatureServe ranks the eastern cottontail S5, Secure, in Michigan, and the species is native throughout its state range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
