Washington’s 53 white-tailed jackrabbit records all sit east of the Cascades, most of them in the shrub-steppe and wheat country of Benton, Douglas, and Whitman counties, with named search areas at Hanford Reach National Monument and Columbia National Wildlife Refuge. This is the state’s largest hare and the one most tied to open ground.
Built for open country
A white-tailed jackrabbit can cover twenty feet in a bounding stride and outrun nearly anything chasing it, so it has little use for thickets. It rests by day in a shallow form scraped in the dirt and feeds by night on grasses and forbs, shifting to bark and shrub twigs when snow covers the green growth. In the cold months its coat molts from gray-brown to white, matching the open ground it cannot hide from.
On the ground in every season
Jackrabbits neither hibernate nor migrate, and Washington’s records reflect that, appearing in nearly every month with no sharp seasonal spike. Leverets are born fully furred with open eyes and are moving within hours, a strategy that suits an animal with no burrow to retreat to.
Status in Washington
NatureServe ranks the white-tailed jackrabbit S2, Imperiled, in Washington even though the species is G5, Secure, across its full range. It is native to the state’s shrub-steppe, and the contrast tells the real story: the hare is widespread across the West, but Washington holds a range-edge population in open country that has been heavily converted to agriculture.
Full species profile
