WELLFLEET — For decades, the New England cottontail, a rare species of rabbit, appeared to be nearly wiped out here. But a new study has found evidence that these rabbits may be thriving on the Outer Cape.
New England cottontails were once widespread in the Northeast but have been driven to near-extinction by development and by competition with an introduced species, the eastern cottontail. Today, they manage to hold on only in scattered patches of habitat including on the Upper and Mid-Cape. On the Outer Cape, however, they seemed to have been eliminated altogether. Hunters found a few in the National Seashore in 2010, but a follow-up survey by the Mass. Div. of Fisheries and Wildlife failed to find them anywhere east of Hyannis.
The new study, led by University of Vermont master’s candidate Carolyn Hanrahan and first reported in her thesis, was not about rabbits at all but about coyotes. Hanrahan and her team were studying coyotes’ diets by sampling scat in the Seashore and performing genetic analysis on it to figure out what the animals were eating.
Hanrahan found that New England cottontail DNA was present in 20 percent of the researchers’ fall samples of coyote scat and in 40 percent of their summer samples. In summer, in fact, the coyotes seemed to be finding more New England cottontails than eastern ones.
David Scarpitti, who leads the turkey and upland game project at Fisheries and Wildlife, said that he and his colleagues had suspected that New England cottontails persisted out here and were glad to have a study to document that fact.
A Rabbit Becomes Rare
New England cottontails look identical to the much more widespread eastern cottontails, Scarpitti said — both are medium-sized, big-eared brown rabbits. Both species are found on Cape Cod today, and a DNA test is required to tell them apart.
Ecologically, however, the two species are quite different. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, eastern cottontails prefer to live in open grassy areas with bushes around the edges, while New England cottontails live deep within dense, shrubby, wet thickets. The two species also have different numbers of chromosomes, Scarpitti added, suggesting that they are evolutionarily quite distinct.
When Europeans first arrived on Cape Cod, New England cottontails were found from the Hudson River east to southern Maine. They were the only rabbits around here then, Scarpittii said. Eastern cottontails, which are actually native to the Midwest, were found only west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Because New England cottontails are reliant on dense habitat, they fared poorly as settlers turned thickets into suburbs and towns. Their populations began to decline. Then, in the early 20th century, hunting clubs introduced the eastern cottontail in the Northeast. Their populations exploded. This was bad news for New England cottontails.
“They’re eating the same food; they’re occupying the same space,” Scarpitti said. The competition, combined with habitat loss and other factors like overgrazing by deer and the arrival of less nutritious invasive plants, drove New England cottontails toward endangerment. Today, the species is found in just a quarter of the range it occupied 60 years ago.
Holding On
On Cape Cod, Scarpitti said, New England cottontails appeared to be most prevalent in Sandwich, Mashpee, and parts of Barnstable and Falmouth — but not beyond the more developed area of Hyannis. Although the Outer Cape has not had the same degree of development as the rest of the Cape, the land here was extensively cleared soon after Europeans’ arrival.
But since then, the forests and thickets have regrown. “We always thought there was potential,” Scarpitti said, for New England cottontails here.
In 2010, Fisheries and Wildlife performed DNA tests on rabbit specimens on the Outer Cape and found evidence of only a few New England cottontails. Hanrahan’s research, then, is the first evidence in 15 years that they may be thriving here.
Hanrahan wrote about her findings for the Fall 2024 newsletter of the New England Cottontail Conservation Initiative, a collaboration between governments and private conservation groups to protect the rare rabbit.
Scarpitti thinks that the reason the earlier surveys couldn’t find more of New England’s native species was that they tend to live in habitat that is extremely difficult to survey: “the thorny, thick, wet, just uncomfortable areas — but that’s where they like to be.”
Whereas other parts of their range are threatened by development, New England cottontail habitat here is well protected by the National Seashore, Scarpitti added. Plus, the nutrient-poor soils and windy conditions keep forests from growing too quickly, which keeps scrubby thicket habitat widespread without the need for human intervention. “A lot of threats that might exist in other places don’t really exist out there, and uniquely so,” he said.
Hanrahan said she is considering continuing her research to try to figure out whether New England cottontail DNA is more common in one specific location or another out here.
