An invasive species of rabbit has been popping up in parts of Maine over the last several years.
First spotted in 2017 in Kittery, the Eastern Cottontail Rabbit has become more widespread.
Invasive Eastern Cottontail Rabbit. (National Park Service)
The biggest fear is that this rabbit will replace the New England Cottontail, which is native to Maine.
“When we first found them in Kittery and in Portland, we did a trap and removal effort, but they do seem fairly difficult to trap. We missed some, we couldn’t get them all, and they very quickly repopulated,” said Cory Stearns, a small mammal biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife.
Typically, these rabbits have mostly been found east of the Hudson River in New York, but experts say they have been slowly migrating west.
“They’ve been on the Eastern Prom, Munjoy Hill area for quite a while. The last year or two, we started getting reports west of 295, so they’ve really started to spread,” says Stearns.
Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has made it a mission to increase the population of the native New England Cottontail Rabbits.
Native New England Cottontail. (Maine Dept. of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife)
“The New England Cottontail very much stays in their thicket and might come out into the open to feed once in a while at dusk and dawn, that sort of thing. The Eastern Cottontail is much more willing to be out in the open. They thrive in highly developed areas like Portland,” Stearns said.
Stearns says that because the non-native Eastern Cottontail comes out more often, they can raid gardens.
“The two cottontail species are very hard to differentiate. The Eastern Cottontails will occasionally have a white spot on their forehead that the New England Cottontails never do. So that’s really the only way to tell the two species apart,” says Stearns.
Native New England Cottontail. (Maine Dept. of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife)
So if you think you’ve spotted one, you can report it on their website.