Recently we received a letter from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife asking if they could take a walk in our woods to count the New England Cottontail Rabbits living here. Apparently they are the only species of rabbit native to this area, but they are endangered! They prefer to live in “young forests” with dense shrubs or thickly regrowing young trees. However, their habitat is getting smaller and smaller with humans encroaching on their land, aging forests, and predators adapting to the changes in the landscape. Within the last 50 years, the New England Cottontail Rabbits’ habitat has been greatly restricted to southern Maine, southern New Hampshire, and parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York east of the Hudson River, leaving less than a fifth of their historic range. Therefore, the purpose of the wildlife biologists’ visit is to see how our neighbor’s efforts to create a sustainable habitat for the rabbits is going, and to talk to us about what we can do to help.

Our neighbor isn’t the only one working to help the endangered New England Cottontail Rabbit. State and federal agencies, wildlife and conservation organizations, municipalities, land trusts, corporations, private companies and private landowners, are all teaming up to help with conservation efforts, including habitat-creation projects. Therefore we are looking forward to learning more about how we can improve our land to make it not only hospitable to Cottontail Rabbits, but also to help other animals and plants thrive.

If you would like to learn more, please visit NewEnglandCottontail.org. Now if you’ll please excuse me, Asa and I are conducting our own Cottontail count, by comparing this photo of Lemmy from 2010 with his squeaky rabbit friends, with one taken yesterday.