Wildlife Wednesday -- Mountain Cottontail
By Andy Ames
What is a rabbit to do when all its favorite grasses dry up in the winter? Like the other lagomorphs of the Estes Valley (pikas and snowshoe hares), Mountain Cottontails do not hibernate. While pikas collect and store food during the summer to hold them through the winter, hares and rabbits must continue to forage. They turn to a variety of dry grasses, forbs, bark, and twigs. To help with their digestion, lagomorphs are also coprophagous (how is that for a word?). That is, they produce two kinds of feces, moist and hard. We often see the little, round hard pellets on the ground. The moist pellets still contain a lot of nutrients, so lagomorphs re-ingested them and that way those nutrients are not lost.
