Role rabbits play in Illinois
Some rabbits wear pocket watches and are always running late. Some are carrot-chomping cartoon icons that always want to know what’s up.
Others are velveteen animals with identity complexes. Some hop around your yard toting baskets of brightly colored eggs, jelly beans and chocolate.
These are the rabbits of myth, folklore and fiction. They play an important role in cultural history around the world.
Other rabbits — the real live kind — get less press yet, are a fundamental part of our local ecology.
As spring now brings us both the Easter Bunny and garden-eating rabbits, let’s take a look at both the ecological and the legendary world of rabbits.
The wild rabbit in Illinois is called the eastern cottontail, or Sylvilagus floridanus. Cottontails live fast and furious lives of eating, reproducing and doing their darnedest to avoid becoming someone else’s dinner.
As herbivores, eastern cottontails and are well equipped with incisors that are designed to cut plant food. They are often assumed to be rodents, but cottontails are in a separate group of mammals called lagomorphs. This group comprises cottontails, hares and pikas.
Lagomorphs are differentiated from rodents primarily by their teeth. Rabbits have not just one row of upper incisors, but two. The second row is made of peg-like teeth. Lagomorph incisors have only one layer of enamel, compared to the two-layered enamel of mice and their ilk. Both rabbits’ and rodents’ incisors grow continually, requiring constant gnawing to keep them filed.
Lagomorphs have large ears, the better to hear you and other potential predators with. Their eyes are set on the sides of their heads, the better to see you with when you approach. They have twitching noses to smell you with — but mostly to find food.
What they don’t have much of is a tail. The tail of an eastern cottontail is, as its name suggests, a small tuft of white fur resembling a cotton ball.
Adaptations of eastern cottontails and their western cousins, the hares, include long hind feet and strong hind legs for jumping. The ability to get away fast is pretty important for an animal that is prey for just about every predator out there. In our neck of the woods the long list of predators includes owls, coyotes, hawks, weasels, domestic dogs — and lawn mowers.
Eastern cottontails are most numerous in the western and southwestern parts of Illinois. We have our share of them in Kane County, however, with plenty of good habitat in grassy fields with woody brush piles and gardens with shrubbery.
Eastern cottontails build shelters called forms. These are loosely constructed from miscellaneous vegetation. The nest itself is a small depression lined with grass and fur. You may come upon a nest of blind, helpless kits as you are gardening this spring. If the mother, or doe, is not there, don’t worry! The kits are not orphaned; Mom is just out grocery shopping and she will return.
Well known for their reproductive capabilities, eastern cottontail populations can explode in a good year when conditions are right and predators are few. A doe cottontail may produce up to three litters each year, with six kits per litter. Males, or bucks, are polygamous and their amorous activities have the potential to produce scores of progeny in a single season.
Kits from early spring litters may reach reproductive adulthood within the same season. Others will be ready to reproduce the following spring.
Though they are prolific, they are not long lived. Due to the multitude of dangers out in the big wild world, cottontails rarely live more than a year and a half.
Rabbit fur is valued in many cultures, and rabbit pelts were trade items along with mink and beaver several hundred years ago. Rabbit meat has been a protein source in the diet of indigenous peoples and is still eaten today.
The lore and legend of cottontails and their kind span cultures and time. Legendary lagomorphs most familiar to us range from Br’er Rabbit to Peter Rabbit and Bugs Bunny to the warren of “Watership Down.”
Rabbits have played many roles in addition to the ones we’re familiar with in North America.
“In many mythic traditions,” wrote Terri Winding in “The Symbolism of Rabbits and Hares,” “these animals were archetypal symbols of femininity, associated with the lunar cycle, fertility, longevity and rebirth. But if we dig a little deeper into their stories we find that they are also contradictory, paradoxical creatures: symbols of both cleverness and foolishness, of femininity and androgyny, of cowardice and courage, of rampant sexuality and virginal purity. In some lands, Hare is the messenger of the Great Goddess; in other lands he is a god himself, wily deceiver and sacred world creator rolled into one.”
This week the Easter Bunny prevails. S/he (who knows?) will come bearing eggs of all colors, and we will carry on the local tradition of Easter Sunday.
As a rabbit the Easter Bunny symbolizes the prodigality and fecundity of life in this wonderful time of year. So join the kids, follow the jelly bean trail and search for those colored eggs with abandon.
Valerie Blaine is a naturalist with the Forest Preserve District of Kane County. You may reach her at blainevalerie@kaneforest.com.