The mountain cottontail keeps to California’s high, cold corner. Its 369 records belong almost entirely to the Sierra Nevada’s east side and the Modoc Plateau: Mono County leads with 96, followed by El Dorado, Lassen, Modoc, and Inyo, and the Lake Tahoe basin alone accounts for 57, more than any other named site.
California’s high-country rabbit
This is a rabbit of elevation, at home in sagebrush flats, aspen edges, and the brushy understory of conifer forest well above the valley heat. Where the desert cottontail owns the low, hot south, the mountain cottontail holds the Sierra’s forested slopes and the lava country of the far northeast. Its records trace exactly that range: Inyo, Tahoe, and Eldorado national forests along the Sierra crest, Lava Beds National Monument in the Modoc country, and the White Mountains Wilderness on the Nevada line.
A short mountain summer
Mountain cottontails breed through the brief warm season, raising litters in the months when their high range is free of snow. The record follows that rhythm, building through May to a June and July peak and collapsing to almost nothing between November and March, when deep snow covers the Sierra and the rabbits keep to burrows and the shelter of buried brush. It is not absence; it is winter at eight thousand feet.
Status in California
NatureServe has not assigned the mountain cottontail a California rank (SNR), and the species is G5, secure, across its western range. It is native to the state, not listed as nonindigenous by USGS NAS, and carries no state-level conservation listing.
Full species profile
