The white-tailed jackrabbit is a big hare of Colorado’s open country. Open occurrence databases hold 473 records for it statewide, 148 of them iNaturalist photos, the balance drawn from museum specimens and survey data.
Where it lives in Colorado
This is not a rabbit of the brushy suburbs. The white-tailed jackrabbit wants wide, treeless ground: the shortgrass plains of the eastern counties and, just as much, the high mountain parks and sagebrush basins above them. Records cluster in Saguache and Alamosa in the San Luis Valley, in Jackson County’s North Park, and across the high grasslands of Park and Gunnison counties. It is a runner built for the open, bounding away in long low leaps when flushed rather than dodging into cover.
Active through the coldest months
Unlike the ground squirrels of the same grasslands, this hare does not hibernate, and its record does not go dark in winter. Some of its highest counts fall in the depths of January, when its summer gray-brown coat has molted to a pale, near-white winter pelage that blends with snow. Scanning for a large, ghost-pale hare against a frozen field is one of the more reliable ways to find one, and the winter observations bear that out.
Status in Colorado
The white-tailed jackrabbit is native and ranked S4, apparently secure, by NatureServe, a notch below fully secure. Across parts of its wider range it has declined as grassland is lost and as the black-tailed jackrabbit expands upslope, which makes Colorado’s high parks and intact plains an increasingly important stronghold.
Full species profile
