Minnesota’s 83 white-tailed jackrabbit records hug the prairie side of the state: Clay, Polk, and Roseau counties in the Red River valley, Lac qui Parle and Pope in the western parklands, and Pipestone and Rock in the southwestern grass country around Blue Mounds State Park. Its map is almost a perfect outline of Minnesota’s remaining open country.
A runner built for the open
This jackrabbit does not burrow. It rests by day in a shallow form scraped in the grass and trusts long ears, wide-set eyes, and hind legs built for speed, roughly 35 miles per hour in a sprint, to escape what it cannot out-hide. That survival plan only works where sightlines are long, which is why its Minnesota range tracks prairie and open farmland rather than forest, from Minneopa State Park west to the Red River.
A coat that follows the snow
Like the snowshoe hare, the white-tailed jackrabbit trades its summer gray-brown for winter white as daylight shortens, staying active all year on a cold-season diet of dried grass, buds, and bark. Records run through every month in Minnesota, climbing in March, holding through spring, and lifting again in August as the year’s young grow independent.
Status in Minnesota
NatureServe lists the white-tailed jackrabbit SNR, Unranked, in Minnesota and G5, Secure, globally. The species is native to the state, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
