What Do Wild Rabbits Eat? A Diet of the Obvious and the Odd

Wild rabbits live an all-or-nothing life. Just like their renowned reproductive capacity, their diets are also abundant.

Wild rabbits eat almost all plants and parts of the plant, whether it grows in a farmer’s field or a forest. Rabbits did not lose their food preferences or behaviors when they became domesticated.

Some species also take advantage of novelty options in their habitat. Another menu item is typical of small animals like rabbits and rodents. It still shocks readers: poop.

Here is a guide on what rabbits eat and overlapping topics. It includes how wild rabbits digest, their roles in the food web, and how they live.

Wild Rabbit Biology: How They Digest Food

Rabbits are herbivores. They will graze on herbaceous plants like grass and clover all the time. As they are crepuscular with nocturnal leanings, wild rabbits graze at dawn, dusk, and night.

Digesting so much fiber requires chambered stomachs like cows do or long intestines. 

Rabbits have long intestines, called a long hindgut. Extra intestines give the cellulose in plants an extended time to work on digestion. They can then better break down, ferment, and absorb. Hindgut fermentation lets animals gain more nutrition from smaller amounts of food faster.

Rabbits also have a large organ between the small and large intestine called a cecum, or caecum.

This organ is small in humans but ten times larger than the stomach in rabbits. In herbivores, it stores and ferments food in a bacteria-rich environment. After that, it lubricates and moves the food along.

Without the excess bacteria and gut length, wild rabbits would not get enough nutrition free from the plant fiber.

The cecum also separates the fibrous content from the nutritious. It stores the nutrition for later use and manufactures some B vitamins.

Wild Rabbit Ecology: Food Web, Lifespan, Habitat, Eating Habits

Food web and foraging behavior

Rabbits are near the bottom of the food chain in the wild. For this reason, they live for a year or two, even though domestic rabbits often live close to ten years.

When wild rabbits graze, they need constant alertness for predators. Common hunters include weasels, foxes, snakes, and hawks.

Like most herbivores, rabbits’ eyes are on the sides of their head for a full panoramic view. Long ears let them grasp sounds while their faces push through the grass. Their legs are ready for a fast but zig-zagging escape to a burrow.

Lifespans and Life Stages of Wild Rabbits

Domestic rabbits often live between five to ten years. But wild rabbits face more dangers. Faced with a long list of predators and diseases that kill them, wild rabbits who reach adulthood live between one and two years.

They become adults at around three months and are capable of reproduction at six months. As adults, common species like the European wild rabbit and the Eastern cottontail weigh between one to two kilograms (2-3 lbs). They also measure head to rump between 38 and 48 cm (14-18”).

Where Do Wild Rabbits Live?

Wild rabbits live almost anywhere. They live in groups, called colonies or nests in different ecosystems.

Rabbits like grasslands, forests, deserts, tundra, mountains, and wetlands. They also adapt well to human environments. You will likely see them in parks, on university campuses, on roadsides, and at golf courses.

You can find them on six continents, all but Antarctica. Rabbits avoid unstable land for their burrows or their surface nests called forms. They also need places with year-round food. So you won’t find them at alpine elevations, in flood plains, dense urban areas, or thick forests.

The wilderness has 29 species of rabbits. The European cottontail is the species where more than 300 domestic species originated.

Eating Habits of Wild Rabbits

Rabbits live cautious lives. They set up an underground burrow or surface-level nest called a form. Then when it’s time to forage, they inch beyond their shelter and eat whatever is closest. They like to have a safe place to run to if they spot any trouble.

They will first polish the food available nearby. After that and when they feel bold, rabbits sprint to the next nearest forage area. If that area is far from their home and has a bushy corridor they can take, rabbits will use the safe detour rather than sprint through the open.

Wild rabbits focus on safety from predators over access to food. They graze when nothing disturbs them. They even stay in their shelter if the weather interferes with their ability to detect predators.

Rabbits will also choose a less nutritious zone if the best place has more predators.

If they need to reach up into bushes for food, rabbits will stand on their hind legs. They will use their front paws to push branches to their mouths.

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What Do Rabbits Eat in the Wild? Amounts and Types

Most rabbit species eat around 150 species of plants. They feed on whatever is available in their habitat during a given season. Even different parts of a plant matter in different seasons. On a given day, they eat an average of 100–150 grams of:

• Roots
• Leaves
• Seeds
• Seedlings
• Bark
• Flowers
• Fruits

These items can come from grass, herbs, succulents, bushes, or small trees. If it’s a plant and small enough for a rabbit to get its teeth through, it would likely eat the plant. Also, rabbits eat their poop.

Hindgut and Feces

When grazing, wild rabbits eat fast for around thirty minutes. Then they get picky in the following thirty minutes. As long as no predators or curious people disturb them, rabbits repeat this process for several hours.

During this time, rabbits excrete waste pellets. These are the harder rounded scat. They are the fibrous, low-nutrition parts from eaten plants.

In other circumstances, rabbits have soft, mucous-lined dark scat. These feces come from the cecum. The cecum had separated and stored this content from the fiber.

Wild rabbits eat the soft poop or cecotropes to get nutrients they missed the first time around. Scientists call this diet coprophagy. Kopros- is Greek for dung. And -bhag is Proto Indo-European for sharing. It is a suffix scientists use to describe various eating habits.

Rabbits tend to eat these at night, so the feces are often called night feces. The mucus allows the scat to keep vitamins, minerals, and proteins as they sit in stomach acid for up to six hours. 

When the poop exits a second time, it’ll be hard and fiber-textured waste pellets.

Waste pellets by weight are more than half bacteria and a quarter protein. Night feces, meanwhile, have up to five times the nutrition.

Young and old

Baby wild rabbits, called kittens, will nurse briefly once per day for their first month. Rabbit milk is extra nutrient-dense to make up for the lack of parental attentiveness. It’s among the richest milk of all mammals.

Sometimes stressed mothers will eat their young.

Between Species

The widest variation of diets with rabbits is between species. Some species have a broad range like most of Europe or the eastern US. Others have specific habitats and diets limited to plants growing in those habitats.

Pygmy rabbits (Brachylagus idahoensis) and mountain cottontail or Nuttall’s cottontail (Sylvilagus nuttallii) have a sagebrush diet. They’ll eat other bushes and grasses when those are available such as in the spring and summer. But sagebrush dominates their range, and so it’s their main meal, especially in the winter.

Riverine or bushman rabbits (Bunolagus monticularis) live in the Karoo Desert of South Africa. They browse or eat bushes, which is common in arid-climate rabbits.

Seasonal Changes

In the spring, clover and grass shoots are popular. Especially in arid habitats, flowers and grasses don’t exist or offer any nutrition at other times of the year.

Come summer, wild rabbits eat the fruits, flowers, seedlings, and twigs of many trees, crops, and briars. These include blackberry bushes, cherry trees, roses, clovers, winter wheat, and soybeans.

During autumn and winter, rabbits scout for the bark of sprouts and the bark of seedlings. Rabbits also will sometimes dig to eat roots and seeds.

Fruits such as acorns remain on the forest floor during this time of year. Wild rabbits are well-known for having lean meat. But after a feast on acorns, rabbits put on enough fatty tissue that even their kidneys have a fat layer. After eating so much, they don’t even get sick.

In tropical regions, the wet season has similar foods as spring and summer. The dry season offers autumn and winter options.

Pygmy and mountain rabbits may eat sagebrush exclusively. During the harsh American intermountain west winter, that’s all there is.

Wild Options versus Borrowing from Humans

Wild rabbits aren’t picky. Farms and gardens need adequate fencing to prevent rabbit invasions. Good fencing digs into the ground, stands at least two feet high, and is closed like chicken wire. Otherwise, small animals like rabbits will dig or jump through.

Like domestic rabbits, wild ones eat lettuce, carrots, rice, and other produce. They will also consume your flowers and tree seedlings.

If people leave oats, peanuts, or wood chippings out, rabbits will eat those.

Novelty Foods

Rabbits are as strictly herbivores as any animal. But in rare cases, naturalists have noted snail shells shoved as piles outside of their dens.

Early observers doubted other animals left the shells there. They suspected that the rabbits had kept snails inside and shoved them out after eating. Years later, naturalists spotted rabbits eating snails and even arthropods.

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Environmental Threats By and To Wild Rabbit Habitat

How Wild Rabbits Pose a Threat to Some Environments

Rabbits populate with ease and can live anywhere. So they can be more of a hazard to the environment than habitat destruction can be on them.

This strain applies most when rabbits get introduced to places they weren’t before, like islands. Rabbits outcompete native grazers, overgraze native plants, and encourage soil erosion. Rabbits also can cause problems for farmers.

Australia has struggled with a rabbit invasion for decades. Land managers have tried fumigating, fencing, shooting, trapping, and ferreting. All provided minimal improvement. But myxoma virus and calicivirus have been helpful biological controls.

But scientists in Spain developed a genetically modified virus for European rabbit farmers. They meant it to prevent the stock from getting myxoma virus or calicivirus. If this modified virus invades Australia, the population will no longer be susceptible to their primary cause of death.

Threats to Habitats of Specialized Wild Rabbits

Some other rabbits are rare due to preferring a specific and limited habitat.

The Sumatran striped rabbit (Nesolagus netscheri) and the volcano rabbit (Romerolagus diazi) of Mexico are unusual species. They live in mountain top dense forests. They both also need nests in volcanic soil.

It’s unclear why few people have seen this animal. It might be because of the rabbit’s dense habitat. But it might also be because of human disturbance in those forests.

The Amami rabbit (Pentalagus furnessi) lives limited to a few forested Japanese islands. Over recent decades, the islands have had more logging.

Logging often selects trees by age, leaving a fragmented forest with trees of similar age. This lack of age diversity leaves less food and shelter for endangered animals like the Amami rabbit.

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What Do Rabbits Eat in the Wild FAQs

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