Nearly half of Mississippi’s 185 swamp rabbit records come from one stretch of the state. Jackson County alone holds 90, Gulf Islands National Seashore leads the named sites with 18, and Hancock and Harrison counties add 27 more. The map confirms what the name promises. This is a rabbit of wet ground.
A cottontail at home in the water
The swamp rabbit is the largest of the cottontails, and the only one that treats water as refuge rather than barrier. It swims readily and well, crosses sloughs and bayous without hesitation, and perches on half-submerged logs and root tangles to feed above floodwater. Cane, sedges, and lush waterside grasses make up the diet, and dense, saturated cover is essential, which separates it cleanly from the upland, edge-loving eastern cottontail. Mississippi’s coastal marshes, the Pascagoula River bottoms, and the wet thickets around Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge and Buccaneer State Park are exactly its ground.
Growth season brings them out
Reports rise steadily from April through July, when warm-season growth thickens the waterside tangles the rabbit depends on and breeding is in full swing. Like other cottontails, swamp rabbits raise multiple litters through the long southern season in grass-lined surface nests, so midsummer sightings often include half-grown young feeding at the edges of openings.
Status in Mississippi
NatureServe ranks the swamp rabbit S5, Secure, in Mississippi, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
