Oregon’s 732 mountain cottontail records belong almost entirely to the state’s dry interior. Deschutes County alone accounts for 290, with Harney and Jefferson close behind, and the named sites read like a tour of the high desert: Deschutes National Forest, the Oregon Badlands Wilderness Area, Crooked River National Grassland, and John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.
A rabbit of sagebrush and rimrock
Where western Oregon’s brush rabbit hides in dense thickets, the mountain cottontail lives out in sagebrush, juniper, and rocky broken country east of the Cascades. It shelters in abandoned burrows and heavy brush rather than digging its own, feeds on grasses and sagebrush through the growing season, and in winter strips bark and twigs from sagebrush and juniper. Records out of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the basin country around Harney County fit that open, arid profile.
Most visible when the desert greens
Reports climb from spring and crest from May through July, when breeding is underway, young rabbits are out of the nest, and cottontails feed in the open at dawn and dusk. The species stays active all winter rather than hibernating, and even the leanest months in the Oregon series still carry sightings from snow-covered desert flats.
Status in Oregon
NatureServe ranks the mountain cottontail S4, Apparently Secure, in Oregon, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
