Mississippi’s 267 eastern cottontail records spread across 49 counties, thickest in Pearl River County with 55, and run from De Soto National Forest in the Piney Woods to the scrub and dune edges of Gulf Islands National Seashore.
A rabbit of the seams
Cottontails live on boundaries, where dense cover meets short grass: field borders, briar tangles, brushy ditch banks, and the young growth that follows a timber cut or a burn. They do not dig burrows. A cottontail rests by day in a form, a shallow depression tucked into grass or low brush, and feeds at dawn and dusk on grasses, clover, and garden growth, switching to bark and twigs in winter. Mississippi’s mild winters and long growing season suit that routine, and records from Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge and the coastal reserves show the rabbit working the drier, brushy ground inside an otherwise wet landscape.
Breeding season fills the year
Reports climb sharply from April through July, and that is biology, not chance. Cottontails in the South breed from late winter into early fall, raising several litters a year in grass-lined nests hidden in plain sight. By midsummer, young rabbits from successive litters are feeding in the open alongside adults, which is when a cottontail on a field edge becomes an everyday sight.
Status in Mississippi
NatureServe ranks the eastern cottontail S5, Secure, in Mississippi, and the species is native statewide. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
