In our three-plus decades living just 100 yards from Concord’s White Park we’ve seen deer — far too many deer — squirrels, raccoons, possums, skunks, hawks, wild turkeys and bears. One winter, a moose walked through the yard. But in all those years neither we, nor our outdoors savvy neighbors, had ever seen a rabbit. Now we see them all the time.
Thus the question I posed to Dr. Stephanie Simek, the executive director of New Hampshire’s Fish and Game Department. Dr. Simek was kind enough to respond by email with a long list of likely reasons.
“In areas like Concord, predator pressure will fluctuate. Raptors, coyotes, foxes, bobcat may be present, but they will be more cautious in dense neighborhoods, and this provides ‘safer zones’ for rabbits to reproduce.” Yeah, we all know about rabbits.
Lawns, gardens and ornamental shrubs provide ample food, Simek said. And when rabbits are feeling safe and food is plentiful, a female bunny can have three or four litters of three to eight kits per year. Within less than six months of its birth, each of those female kits can begin producing babies of their own. A high reproduction rate and low predation rate makes for lots of rabbits.
Around Concord, those rabbits are almost certainly Eastern cottontails, a game species imported to New England from the midwest, Simek said. The imports didn’t just prosper, they outcompeted the native New England cottontail, which is slightly smaller and requires a brushier, less fragmented landscape. It’s now limited to just a few locales in southeastern New Hampshire. Eastern cottontails have larger eyes and bigger ears, assets that help them spot, and avoid, predators faster than our native bunnies.
Rabbits, for those of you who aren’t too keen on mice, rats and their kin, are not rodents. They’re lagomorphs, vegetarians that have four incisors instead of a rodent’s two. In another key difference, unlike rodents, rabbits can be found on the menu of upscale restaurants in the form of stew, pies and other dishes.
New Hampshire Fish and Game biologist Heidi Holman never saw rabbits when, in 2005, she began working to return the endangered Karner blue butterfly to the remnants of the pine barrens on Concord Heights. Now she sees them often.
Holman, who oversees the NH Rabbit Report, a cooperative citizen science project with UNH to track rabbit sightings, said there may be another reason for the recent increase — more snow-free weeks thanks to climate change.
Most people have suffered the embarrassment of showing up at a party under or over dressed — think summer whites after Labor Day. When that happens to a rabbit it can mean that it’s on the menu.
Cottontail rabbits, both Eastern and New England, do not change colors seasonally. The less time their gray-brown fur stands out against a snowy white backdrop the more likely they are to stay alive. Unfortunately, the opposite phenomenon seems to be behind the decline in the population of their seasonally dimorphic cousin, the Northern snowshoe hare, whose change from brown to white is triggered by shortening periods of daylight.
Writing in the magazine Northern Woodlands, UNH emeritus professor of wildlife ecology John Litvaitis explained that snowshoe hares’ coats were often changing from brown to white weeks or even months before snow covered the ground. “This can have lethal consequences . . .” Litvaitas wrote.
For the many creatures that view them as dinner, rabbits and hares are the equivalent of cheeseburgers bouncing through forest and field. What the increase of rabbits and decline of hares means for New England’s wildlife food web remains to be seen. But the way things are going, it’s almost certainly going to be up to nature, not mankind, to sort it all out.
Ralph Jimenez of Concord served on the Monitor editorial board.