There Goes Peter Cottontail

The rabbit most often seen stealing veggies from a Connecticut garden is likely not the native New England cottontail. It probably is the Eastern cottontail, a slightly larger rabbit introduced a century ago, that now outnumbers the native 10 to 1.

Once common, the New England cottontail’s historic range has shrunk by more than 80 percent. They aren’t found anywhere in Vermont, and across the six states, they are reduced to five small populations.

Wildlife officials have been worried about the New England cottontail for 11 years, and in 2006, the federal government officially named it one of 251 candidate species for possible listing under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Connecticut appears to be doing better, with more of them surviving, than the other New England states. Eastern Connecticut is one hot spot. The New England cottontail has been documented in Groton, Stonington, North Stonington, Griswold, Voluntown, Plainfield, Lyme, and Lebanon.

“Connecticut plays a unique role in the restoration effort because, of all the New England states, our state continues to support the most significant proportion of the remaining New England cottontail population,” said Rick Jacobson, director of the state Department of Environmental Protection Wildlife Division. “Efforts at restoring habitat may preclude the need for this species to be federally listed.”

State biologists have started cutting down trees on some public land and planting dense thickets of bushes the New England cottontails need to survive. Some of this work has taken place in Moodus, and northern New London County is next.

The two cottontail species, Eastern and New England, look so much alike to the untrained eye that biologists often rely on DNA testing of droppings to be sure. But they do know that the two species do not cross-breed. New Englands have smaller skulls. Easterns have larger eyes and seem to do better spotting a fox or hawk to avoid being eaten.

The native rabbit’s difficulties in finding places to hide from predators highlight a greater problem—the landscape continues to change over to more of a planned suburban park than a combination of forest and field, the diversity of habitat needed by so many species. While forest is Connecticut’s natural landscape, healthy forests are those that include trees and plants at all stages of growth. Many of Connecticut’s forests today tend to hold trees of similar age, a sign of how regrowth happened after farms were abandoned.

A hundred and more years ago, a lot of the state was open farmland. Pre-farming, the natural forest would have been disturbed periodically by fires, cuttings, and then regrowth, which would create large patches of growth at all stages. Speaking generally, the trees that reestablished on abandoned farms tend to be 50 to 100 years old.

The work to cut these older trees in areas of 25 and more acres will create more “early successional wildlife habitat,” meaning bushes, vines, and saplings. New England cottontails need these for food and cover, but so do at least 46 other species that are in danger because of the lack of young trees and bushes. These include wood turtles, leopard frogs, and many birds such as towhees, ruffed grouse, and woodcock.

The key to helping the New England cottontails, the DEP biologists said, will be to get private landowners involved. They encourage people to place brush piles and thickets of bushes on their properties, because Connecticut is 95 percent privately held land.

Jacobson, of the DEP, said it is “critical that private landowners, including land trusts, conservation organizations, and other land managers become involved.”

The state’s efforts to create thickets of young growth in which the New England cottontails can hide will succeed only in places where they are already living. State biologists have documented the New England cottontail in 41 towns, mostly along the Housatonic River Valley and in eastern Connecticut.

“With New England cottontails, you really need to target where you work,” said Paul Rothbart, a DEP biologist who is leader of the New England Cottontail Project in the state. He said that rabbits usually disperse as far as one mile, so, “If they’re not there and you’re not relocating them there, they are not going to just appear. If you make little patches, those areas are going to be too small.”

Connecticut’s cottontail project biologists have mapped areas of state forest and hunting lands where they will remove trees and plant thickets to provide the right habitat.

The New England cottontails rely on dense thickets to protect them. Development has made that kind of tangled camouflage a rare landscape, and even when it still exists, it’s in small fragmented patches – not enough space to provide food – or are made up of invasive plants like multiflora rose or barberry, which don’t offer quality food for the New Englands, leaving them to venture out into the open more.

“Predation can be a big factor on rabbits,” Rothbart said.  “Particularly when areas are cut into little patches, a hawk or fox can find them more easily.”

The three states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, where more is known about the status of the New England cottontail, have each received $223,000 in grant money from the private Wildlife Management Institute to plan and plant thickets on state land. Other states received lesser sums for planning and survey work.

Connecticut’s target areas on public land include a small site on Camp Columbia in Moodus; Goshen Wildlife Management Area, Roraback Wildlife Management Area in Harwinton, and in the Housatonic River Wildlife Management Area in Kent.

Next the state plans to plant thickets in areas of northern New London County, Rothbart said. The work is part of a new regional initiative. The DEP Wildlife Division, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are partners.

Other regional initiatives to keep the New England cottontail off the Endangered Species List include work by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Coastal Program. Roger Williams Zoo in Rhode Island has accepted six rabbits trapped in Connecticut to try breeding in captivity.