The desert cottontail ( Sylvilagus audubonii ), also known as Audubon's cottontail, is a New World cottontail rabbit and a member of the family Leporidae. This medium-sized cottontail, with its buff-brown color lined with black above and white below, is a common sight in the arid regions of southwestern North America. This article delves into the dietary habits of this adaptable creature, exploring what it eats, how it obtains its food, and how its diet is influenced by environmental factors.
Physical Characteristics and Habitat
The desert cottontail has brown-gray fur above and lighter fur on its undersides. It has big eyes, puffy, round tails and long, wide ears with little fur in them. The female desert cottontail is usually a little larger than the male. The desert cottontail can be found in woodlands, grasslands, creosote brush and desert areas. These cottontails frequently are associated with prairie dog towns.
Desert Cottontails are found throughout much of southwestern North America, from Montana down to central Mexico and west to the Pacific coast. Desert Cottontails inhabit arid regions, including woodlands and grasslands. In general, it is found at elevations from sea level to about 6,000 feet. These areas are dominated by plants and animals adapted to aridity, though spectacular blooms may occur following rain.
General Diet of the Desert Cottontail
Cottontails are herbivores, with 90% of their diet consisting of grass. Cottontails feed on grasses and green plants, during the spring and summer and on bark and twigs during the fall and winter months. They also feed on the leaves and peas of mesquite, barks, fallen fruit, the juicy pads of prickly pear and twigs of shrubs. Due to seasonality and changes in moisture conditions of their habitat, cottontails adjust their diets based on many influential factors that impact the seasonal changes of vegetation (i.e.
The desert cottontail rarely needs to drink, getting its water mostly from the plants it eats or from dew.
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Feeding Behavior
The desert cottontail, like all cottontails, eats on all fours. It can only use its nose to move and adjust the position of the food that it places directly in front of its front paws on the ground. The cottontail turns the food with its nose to find the cleanest part of the vegetation (free of sand and inedible parts) to begin its meal. The only time a cottontail uses its front paws to enable eating is when vegetation is above its head on a living plant.
Coprophagy: Eating Twice for Optimal Nutrition
You can tell when a cottontail has been around by their droppings. Cottontails deposit two kinds of fecal pellets. The hard and brown pellets are formed from fully digested plant materials, while the soft and green pellets are only partially digested materials. Rabbits must reingest these soft pellets to extract the full nutritional value from their food. This process is called caprophagy. Cottontails are coprophagic, that is they consume their food twice. They produce two types of fecal pellets. The dry ones are the ones you most typically see on the ground.
Habitat and Diet Adaptations
Desert Cottontails are adapted to various habitats from grasslands to cactus deserts.
Due to variable temperatures of their habitats, desert cottontails must be adequate thermoregulators to minimize water loss during the hotter seasons and require shaded areas of their environment to conduct evaporative water loss through thermal heat transfer. In open-desert areas, they can withstand for a short period extremely high temperatures of around 45 °C (113 °F), and have a large evaporative water loss capacity of around 1.5% body mass/hour, though cottontails can withstand longer in an ideal environment with shaded areas. To cope with evaporative heat loss, they do panting and undergo changes in production of their basal metabolic rate in relation to the ambient temperature of the environment.
Ecological Role and Threats
Cottontails can graze on grasses until they are depleted in an area, causing habitat change.
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Many desert animals prey on cottontails, including birds of prey, mustelids, coyotes, bobcats, Mexican wolves, mountain lions, snakes, weasels, humans, and even squirrels, should a cottontail be injured or docile from illness. Alien species, such as cats and dogs, are also known predators, and also pose a threat. Southwestern Native Americans hunted them for meat but also used their fur and hides. It is also considered a game species, due to which it is hunted for sport.
Habitat loss due to land clearing and cattle grazing may severely affect the population of the desert cottontail. Human-induced fires are also a potential threat for desert cottontail populations. Another factor is its competition with the black-tailed jackrabbit (Lepus californicus), because both have the same diet, and share the same habitat. When a season has been particularly dry, there is less plant life to go around. An extremely wet winter season means increased plant life in the spring, and thus increases in cottontail populations.
Behavior
The desert cottontail is most active in the early morning and in the evening. It spends the hottest part of the day under cover. The desert cottontail does not build its own den, although it may scratch a depression under a bush or other vegetation. Sometimes it will rest in the burrow of another animal. Desert Cottontails take refuge in other animal's burrows as well as in their own scratched-out depressions. These pear-shaped burrows are lined with dried grasses and filled with rabbit fur in anticipation of baby cottontails.
The desert cottontail's normal behavior upon spotting a potential predator is to freeze in place in an attempt to avoid being detected. If it determines that it is in danger, it will flee the area by hopping away in a zigzag pattern. Cottontails can reach speeds of over 30 km/h (19 mph).
Reproduction
Mating season runs from January to late summer. The female makes a nest by digging a shallow hole in the ground and lining it with fur and grass. A month after mating, she gives birth to one to six babies. The babies are born naked and with their eyes closed. They leave the nest when they are two weeks old. They stay with their mother for another three weeks. They will be ready to mate when they are about three months old. Females usually have two to four litters a year. Some females may have as many as six litters a year. Desert Cottontails may raise two or more litters a year with one to six young in each litter. The young are born hairless and blind after a gestation period of about a month.
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