Of 628 New Hampshire records for the eastern cottontail, well over half sit in just two southern counties, Rockingham and Hillsborough. North of the lakes and into the colder, deeper forest the records thin to almost nothing, a map of the rabbit’s taste for brushy, human-worked ground.
An edge rabbit in a forest state
Cottontails live where open ground meets dense cover: old fields, overgrown pasture, thicket margins, and suburban hedgerows, all common across the southern lowlands and the Seacoast. Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge holds that mix of shrub and meadow, and Hampton Beach and Rye Harbor state parks carry records from the coast itself. Identification deserves care here, because the much rarer New England cottontail occupies some of the same thickets and looks nearly identical.
Three litters a summer
Reports run year-round but swell from May through July, the heart of the breeding season. A female raises several litters between spring and fall, each in a shallow, fur-lined nest scratched into bare ground, and by midsummer young rabbits are everywhere along field edges. Unlike the snowshoe hare, the cottontail keeps a brownish coat through winter, so it shows plainly against New Hampshire snow.
Status in New Hampshire
NatureServe ranks the eastern cottontail S5, Secure, in New Hampshire, and the species is treated as native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
