The eastern cottontail is one of Virginia’s most recorded mammals, with 6,222 records, third in the state’s atlas, and its reach runs the full width of the Commonwealth. Arlington and Fairfax counties lead the counts, but the same rabbit turns up among the dunes of Assateague Island National Seashore, along the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, and on Shenandoah National Park’s mountain slopes.
An edge animal, not a deep-forest one
Cottontails live where open ground for grazing sits close to dense cover for escape: field margins, briar tangles, brushy fencerows, clearings, and suburban lawns. Virginia’s patchwork of farmland, parkland, and cut-over woods supplies that edge from Tidewater to the Blue Ridge, which is why records come as readily from Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal flats as from Jefferson National Forest’s cleared slopes. They almost never dig their own burrows, relying instead on thick cover and shallow resting forms.
A breeding-season surge
Records climb steeply through spring and crest from April through July, with June the single highest month, then fall back through autumn to a winter low. The biology behind that curve is reproduction. Cottontails breed from late winter into early fall, a female raising three or four litters a year in fur-lined nests scraped into open ground, and by midsummer the year’s young are out foraging alongside the adults. Cottontails do not hibernate, so the quiet winter months reflect an animal sitting tight in cover rather than one that has left or gone dormant.
Status in Virginia
NatureServe ranks the eastern cottontail S5, Secure, in Virginia, and the species is native across its range here. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
