THE FOREST CLASSROOM
Left: NHFG biologist Brett Ferry uses a small plastic vial to collect a cottontail pellet for laboratory DNA analysis. Right: In October 2021, UNH students worked to improve New England cottontail habitat at the Forest Society’s Hills Family Forest in Durham.
Searching for Bunnies in the Brush By Carrie Deegan
T
he habitat of the New England cottontail is not a pleasant place to go for a walk. Our native cottontail, also known as a “brush rabbit,” prefers an environment with upwards of 20,000 small woody stems per acre—in other words, an impenetrable thicket. I came to this realization the hard way this winter at the Forest Society’s Hills Family Forest in Durham as I looked for evidence of bunnies with Brett Ferry, a biologist with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department (NHFG). “We’re looking for tracks and poop,” Ferry explains, as we slowly pick our way through thorny shrubs looking for signs on the week-old snow. The pelleted excrement of cottontails is circular compared to more elongated deer scat, but it can be roughly the same size. “I usually tell people they look like M&Ms,” Ferry chuckles. “Well, the brown ones anyway.” I concentrate on this search image as I squeeze between saplings, my jacket snagging on raspberry canes and sending tufts of down airborne. 8 | FOREST NOTES Spring 2022
Collecting rabbit pellets is the most efficient way biologists have found to monitor populations of the New England cottontail, which has suffered a range reduction of more than 80 percent since the 1960s. In New Hampshire, where only two small populations remain—one in the Seacoast and a second in the Merrimack River Valley—the species is listed as endangered. To monitor cottontail populations, scat is scooped into small vials during transect surveys and sent off to a lab at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) where researchers analyze the DNA to decipher how many individual animals live in a habitat patch, as well as their parentage (who is related to whom and how). The southeastern corner of the Hills Family Forest and the adjacent Bunker Creek property, owned by NHFG, in Durham contain about 15 acres of highquality habitat, but during our visit we didn’t find any cottontail pellets. This scrubby “young forest” hasn’t developed on its own but was created by deliberately
clearcutting a more mature forest and planting shrubs about ten years ago. Once it grew up into a thick tangle of alder and poplar saplings, New England cottontails were released here in two consecutive years as part of a captive breeding program to augment struggling wild populations in the region. Unfortunately, these releases were unsuccessful, and the rabbits did not survive to reproduce. “It was disappointing after having releases be successful at other locations” Ferry says. At the nearby Bellamy Wildlife Management Area (WMA), where management efforts have created about 100 acres of suitable habitat, released cottontails have done much better, reproducing in the wild and maintaining their small population after an initial release of eight rabbits in 2013. In 2018, a pellet from one of the Bellamy WMA rabbits was collected on the Hills Family Forest property, igniting hopes that expansion across these landscapes might be occurring, but since that time pellet surveys at the reservation have come up empty.
