Iowa’s white-tailed jackrabbit records are thin, just 5 since 2000, 4 of them from Boone County in central Iowa and one from Osceola County on the Minnesota line, at the far eastern edge of a range built for open, unbroken grassland the state has almost entirely converted to cropland.
A grassland specialist at the eastern edge of its range
This hare survives by outrunning predators across open prairie and sagebrush steppe, the kind of unbroken grassland that has disappeared faster in Iowa than almost anywhere else in its range. Nearly every other state where the white-tailed jackrabbit holds on sits farther west, across the Dakotas, Nebraska, Montana, and the sagebrush country of the Great Basin and Rockies. Iowa marks close to the eastern limit of where this hare has ever been documented, and row-crop agriculture now covers the overwhelming majority of the open ground it once used for food and cover.
Too few records for a season
Iowa’s recent records fall in January, May, July, and August, with July the only month holding two, far too few to show a seasonal pattern. Elsewhere, most white-tailed jackrabbits molt into a nearly all-white winter coat, and a white hare crossing dark, harvested cropland is about as visible as this camouflage-built animal ever gets.
Status in Iowa
NatureServe ranks the white-tailed jackrabbit S3, vulnerable, in Iowa. It’s not listed as nonindigenous by USGS NAS, so it’s treated as native to its Iowa range, a vulnerable standing that fits a hare holding on at the edge of a range that keeps shrinking as open grassland gives way to row crops.
Full species profile
