White-tailed jackrabbits range across Montana’s open country, 135 records spread over 44 counties with Beaverhead, Fergus, and Park counties leading. The named sites, from Yellowstone National Park to the state trust lands of the plains, share one trait: big, open ground where a hare survives on distance and speed rather than cover.
White in winter, brown in summer
Few Montana mammals change so completely with the seasons. As the days shorten, the jackrabbit molts from gray-brown to snow white, keeping only the dark ear tips, then reverses the change in spring. The costume fits an animal of open prairie and sagebrush flats, where snow lies long and there is nowhere to hide but against the ground itself.
A hare that never dens
Unlike rabbits, jackrabbits do not burrow. The young are born fully furred and open-eyed in a shallow surface form and are moving within hours, and the adults stay above ground through Montana’s hardest winters, crouched in forms or sheltering in the lee of brush. Records appear in every month and climb from May through July as the year’s first young hares grow bold enough to be seen.
Status in Montana
NatureServe ranks the white-tailed jackrabbit S5, Secure, in Montana, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
