Vermont’s eastern cottontail record is a lowland record. Of 947 records, more than half sit in Chittenden County, with Addison, Rutland, and Grand Isle carrying most of the rest, a map of the mild Champlain Valley rather than the cold spine of the Green Mountains.
A rabbit Vermont did not start with
The eastern cottontail is not native here. It spread into New England with cleared farmland and deliberate stocking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, filling brushy field edges that the region’s native lagomorphs, the snowshoe hare and the historically scarcer New England cottontail, use differently or not at all. In Vermont it has established itself in the warmer, settled lowlands, around farm hedgerows, suburban thickets, and the brush margins of places like Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge and North Hero and Grand Isle state parks.
Breeding through the short summer
Cottontails stay active all year, but Vermont’s reports crest from April through July, the height of the breeding season, when a female can raise several litters between spring and midsummer, each in a shallow ground scrape lined with her own fur. Winter counts fall off as snow deepens, when cottontails hold tight to brush piles and thicket cover and give themselves away mostly by tracks.
Status in Vermont
Because the eastern cottontail is exotic in Vermont, NatureServe assigns it no state conservation rank (SNA, Not Applicable). Even so, it is fully established and widespread across the state’s lowlands.
Full species profile
