What Do Wild Rabbits Eat? Grass, Herbs and Their Own Droppings

What wild rabbits eat through the year

Rabbits are grazers. They nibble young grass shoots and the leaves of herbs close to the ground, choosing the most tender and nutritious growth. In spring and summer, when plants are lush, green leaves make up almost the whole diet.

As autumn and winter arrive and fresh growth stops, rabbits widen their menu. They eat twigs, buds and the bark of shrubs and young trees, sometimes gnawing all the way around a sapling, and dig up roots. In snowy places this woody food can be all that is available for weeks.

The European rabbit’s diet

The European rabbit is the wild rabbit of Europe and the ancestor of all pet rabbits. It feeds mostly within 25–50 m (80–160 ft) of its warren, so the turf around a colony is often grazed as short as a lawn. It prefers fine grasses such as fescues and favors young leaves. On farmland it eats cereals, especially winter wheat, along with sugar beet and other crops, which is why it is unpopular with farmers where it is common.

Feeding happens mostly from dusk to dawn. Rabbits graze in groups, and many eyes make it easier to spot a predator. A rabbit that has to venture farther from cover uses more energy and takes more risks, so the best grazing near the burrows is kept short while taller vegetation grows farther away.

What do cottontails eat in North America?

The eastern cottontail, the most familiar wild rabbit across much of the United States, eats a similar diet. In summer about half of what it eats is grass, such as bluegrass and wild rye, along with clover, alfalfa, plantain and many other herbs. In winter it switches to woody foods: twigs, bark and buds of trees and shrubs such as maple, birch, oak, dogwood and sumac. Deep snow can actually help, lifting cottontails high enough to reach branches they could not touch in summer.

Cottontails feed mostly in the first hours after dawn and around sunset, rarely far from brush piles, hedgerows or thickets where they can hide.

Why rabbits eat their own droppings

Grass and bark are hard to digest. Rabbits solve this with a large chamber in the gut called the cecum, where bacteria break down plant fiber. The trouble is that the cecum lies after the small intestine, where most nutrients are absorbed, so the products of that fermentation would otherwise be lost.

Rabbits therefore make two kinds of droppings. The familiar hard, round pellets are waste. The other kind, soft, glistening clusters called caecotropes, are packed with protein, B vitamins and other nutrients made by the gut bacteria. Rabbits swallow these directly from the body, usually while resting in the burrow or under cover during the day, and pass them through the gut a second time. This habit, called caecotrophy, is completely normal and is shared by hares and pikas. Without it, rabbits would become malnourished.

How rabbits shape plants and landscapes

Because rabbits graze so intensively, they can change whole ecosystems. In parts of Britain and western Europe, rabbit grazing keeps chalk grassland, heath and coastal dunes open and short, which helps wildflowers, butterflies and ground-nesting birds. When myxomatosis killed most rabbits in the 1950s, many of these grasslands turned to scrub, and some species that depended on short turf declined.

Where rabbits were introduced without their natural predators, the effect can be the opposite. In Australia, huge numbers of rabbits stripped vegetation, prevented trees and shrubs from regenerating and caused severe soil erosion.

Do rabbits eat anything other than plants?

Wild rabbits are true herbivores. They do not hunt animals, and their long gut is built for fermenting plant material. They may accidentally swallow tiny insects along with leaves, but that is chance rather than part of their real diet. Their protein comes from young plant growth and from the bacteria-rich soft droppings described above.

Rabbit diet compared with hares

Hares eat much the same plants as rabbits: grasses, herbs and crops in summer, and twigs and bark in winter. They also re-eat soft droppings. The big difference is how they feed: hares roam over much larger home ranges and rely on speed rather than burrows for safety, so they can feed farther out in open fields. You can read more in rabbit vs hare.