Wyoming’s eastern cottontail records concentrate in the state’s eastern high plains and shortgrass prairie, near Medicine Bow National Forest and the cottonwood-lined stream corridors that thread through the grassland. This is the edge of the species’ range, and it shows: cottontails need fencerows, brushy ravines, and streamside thickets close to open forage, a combination that’s scarce across Wyoming’s dry sagebrush basins but holds on where ranch land and river bottoms create it.
Like eastern cottontails everywhere, Wyoming’s cottontails graze grasses and clover along these edges at dawn and dusk, then switch to woody twigs and bark once snow buries the green growth. They don’t outrun the state’s foxes, hawks, and rattlesnakes; they outbreed them, with females capable of a new litter within hours of the last one. NatureServe ranks the species S3, Vulnerable, in Wyoming, reflecting how thin and patchy suitable habitat is here compared with the species’ Midwest and eastern strongholds.
Only 23 records have been logged for Wyoming, with reports skewing toward July. That’s a small, thin dataset even by the standards of this rarely-recorded species, and it says more about how little of Wyoming suits a fencerow rabbit than about how many are actually out there.
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