Planting Cover for Cottontail Rabbits in the Dakotas and Minnesota

Written by Luke Ruffner Robinson, owner of Montana Fruit Trees in Missoula, Montana.

If you want more cottontails on your place in the Dakotas or Minnesota, plant cover. That's most of it. Below is how we'd lay out a shrub strip and brush piles, and how to keep those same rabbits off your fruit trees. Cottontails rarely feed more than 300 feet from thick woody cover, so a strip of dense, thorny, low shrubs at least 15 feet wide next to grass, plus a few good brush piles, does more for rabbits than anything else you can plant.

Cottontails are a cover animal

South Dakota GFP says cottontails "thrive in a variety of areas, including brushy growth, shelterbelts and forest edges" and "typically avoid large open areas" (SD GFP). Minnesota DNR calls them "creatures of thick cover, such as brush piles, thorn tangles, briars and the like" (MN DNR). Robert Seabloom, UND professor emeritus of biology and a mammal expert, told the Grand Forks Herald "they adapt to a wide variety of habitats" and "they like brushy areas" (Grand Forks Herald via AOL).

Food is almost never the limit. Grass, clover and weeds are everywhere in summer. What's short is a place to hide that's close to the food. Penn State's Mary Gaudette and Margaret Brittingham write, "Rabbits generally do not feed more than 300 feet from protective woody cover" (Penn State Extension). Cottontails "require thick escape cover interspersed with grass and forb habitats for feeding." Get the cover right and spread it so no feeding area is more than 300 feet from it, and you've done most of the job.

Why winter decides how many you've got

Cottontails "do not hibernate and remain active in the winter" (SD GFP). Winter is when they're most exposed. Michigan DNR notes "The rate of exposure increases when snow covers the ground," and a brown rabbit on white snow is easy to spot because "the cottontail does not turn white in winter, as does its larger cousin the snowshoe hare" (Michigan DNR). Predators include "domestic dogs, house cats, owls, skunks, foxes, and snakes" (Penn State Extension).

Deep snow isn't all bad. Seabloom: "If you have a heavy snow winter, they'll like that because they burrow into it." But snow buries the grass, and then they're living on woody plants. "Woody plant foods dominate in winter," and rabbits "consume bark, branch tips, and buds of woody plants" (Penn State Extension). That's the reason your fruit trees are in danger every winter, and it's also why a good shrub patch does double duty as cover and winter food.

What cottontails need through the year

Season	Food	Cover
Spring and summer	Grasses, clovers and other green plants in open strips next to cover	Thick shrubs, tall grass, brush piles. Seabloom says they have "about four litters a year."
Fall	Green plants until frost, then more woody browse	Shrub strips, shelterbelts, brushy fencerows
Winter	"stems, buds, and bark of woody vegetation" (SD GFP); dried plants when snow is thin	Dense, low, thorny shrubs, conifers with branches to the ground, brush piles, snow burrows

Sources: Penn State Extension; SD GFP; Grand Forks Herald via AOL.

Home ranges are small. Penn State says under 15 acres and usually 2.5 to 7, and Minnesota DNR tells hunters a flushed rabbit usually circles back to within 100 yards of where it jumped. Cottontails live their whole lives on a small piece of ground, so a well-built patch on a few acres can hold rabbits year-round.

The plants we grow for rabbit cover

Penn State: "Thorny shrubs with a low, dense growth form, such as raspberry and blackberry, make the best cover," and for winter, "young conifers with branches close to the ground" (Penn State Extension). Michigan DNR recommends mixing winter shrubs with junipers and other conifers that keep their lower branches (Michigan DNR). We built the bundle around hardy plains shrubs and a conifer that fit that description.

Plant	What it gives rabbits	Season	Hardy to
Sea buckthorn	"The branches are dense, stiff, and very thorny" and it "naturally tends to sucker forming thickets" (Ontario OMAFRA). NDSU: its "dense shrubby form provides cover for many wildlife species" (NDSU).	Year-round cover	Zone 2
Rocky Mountain juniper	Evergreen cover low to the ground. Rocky Mountain juniper stands on the northern Great Plains provide habitat for eastern cottontails (USFS FEIS).	Winter cover especially	Zone 2
Golden currant	A native low shrub that fills the base of the strip.	Spring through fall	Zone 2

Other things we grow that fit a rabbit strip: silver buffaloberry (thorny, suckers into "dense, nearly impenetrable thickets," per USFS FEIS), native American plum and Nanking cherry.

A few plant notes. Sea buckthorn is dioecious, with separate male and female plants (Ontario OMAFRA), and so is Rocky Mountain juniper, mostly (USFS FEIS). Ours are seedlings, so the sex is unknown. For cover that doesn't matter at all. Sea buckthorn suckers aggressively (Alberta Agriculture lists "Aggressive suckering; must cultivate to control"; Alberta Agriculture). That's exactly what you want in a rabbit thicket, but don't plant it next to native prairie or a garden you care about.

Junipers also carry the rust diseases that hit apples and crabapples, and University of Minnesota Extension lists hawthorn, serviceberry, pear and mountain ash among the other hosts. Their advice is "Do not plant eastern red cedar and juniper within a few hundred yards" of those plants, and they note spores can travel much farther, so distance lowers the risk without ending it (UMN Extension). Put this patch a few hundred yards from any apples, crabs, pears, hawthorn, serviceberry or mountain ash where you can.

How to lay it out

The shrub strip

Penn State's specs (Penn State Extension):

Dense woody cover 3 to 6 feet tall.
Strips "at least 15 feet wide to provide good protective cover."
In the best habitat, "shrubs cover 20 to 50 percent of the area."
No feeding area more than 300 feet from woody cover.

Michigan DNR goes wider for escape-cover hedgerows ("at least 60 feet wide") and suggests a shrub buffer between food patches and woodlots (Michigan DNR). Michigan State Extension suggests narrow travel strips of cover "ideally five to 15 yards wide" connecting the bigger patches (Michigan State Extension).

Here's how we'd plant one Cottontail Cover Patch (11 plants):

Row	Plants	Spacing	Notes
Windward row	3 Rocky Mountain juniper, alternating with 3 golden currant	About 5 ft apart. Tight on purpose for a rabbit thicket; the junipers will crowd in time, and that's fine here	Junipers give evergreen winter cover. Currants fill the gaps low.
Second row, 6 to 8 ft away	5 sea buckthorn	5 to 6 ft apart, offset from the first row	Suckers will close the gap between rows over a few years.

That makes a patch about 25 to 30 feet long. With the sea buckthorn suckering, it'll knit into a band 15 feet wide or better. Two or three bundles laid end to end, or a bundle at each corner of a hayfield or food strip, starts to cover the 300-foot rule across a few acres. Sea buckthorn will eventually get taller than the 3 to 6 feet rabbits like best (Alberta lists 13 to 20 feet at maturity), so every few years cut some of the oldest stems to the ground. The suckers that come back keep the base thick.

Food next to it

Leave or plant a strip of grass and clover right beside the shrubs. Michigan State Extension suggests a mixed legume and grass strip 30 to 50 yards wide, bordered by brush on at least one side, and names orchard grass, timothy, red clover and white sweet clover as one mix (Michigan State Extension). Mow it in strips at different times so there's always some short green growth.

Brush piles

Brush piles are the fastest cover you can make. They work the first winter, years before the shrubs fill in. Penn State's recipe (Penn State Extension):

Start with a base of rocks or logs "so that cottontails can get underneath."
Pile limbs and shrub branches on top to make "a pile 4 to 7 feet tall and 6 to 20 feet in diameter."
"Space them at distances of 10 to 50 yards so cover is well dispersed."

Michigan State Extension says to build piles with more than one opening, because "Brush piles with a single opening entrance/exit hole can be death traps to cottontails," and to put them closer to the open field edge than to the tall edge of a woodlot (Michigan State Extension). If you're thinning a shelterbelt or cleaning up dead trees, that's your brush pile material.

Edges

Cottontails live on edges. If you've got an old shelterbelt or woodlot with a hard, clean edge against a field, Penn State suggests cutting back into the edge 25 to 50 feet to let it grow up thick and brushy (Penn State Extension). Plant your shrub strip along that new edge.

Snowshoe hares

We get asked whether a cover patch will bring in snowshoe hares. Almost certainly not, unless you're already in hare country. Vermont Fish and Wildlife says "Softwood cover is the single most important habitat need for snowshoe hare," and hares are "most often found in large unbroken patches of young softwood and mixed-forest stands" with understory cover above 60 to 85% (Vermont Fish and Wildlife). That's the northern Minnesota forest, not a prairie farm. If you own land in hare country, the best hare habitat comes from cutting to create thick young conifer and mixed regrowth. A few junipers won't do it. Our patch is a cottontail planting.

Planting and the first three years

Kill the sod in the strip the season before.
Plant early in spring while the bare-root stock is dormant. Soak the roots and keep them from drying out.
Mulch to hold back grass. We'd skip fabric here, since you want the sea buckthorn to sucker into a thicket and Montana State Extension warns "fabric sheets can reduce or eliminate the suckering ability of many shrub and tree species" (MSU Extension).
Run drip. It's the only way we recommend watering young plants. One line down each row.
Protect the young plants from the rabbits you're planting for. Yes, really. Put a hardware cloth collar on each juniper and sea buckthorn for the first couple of winters, until there's enough plant that a little browsing doesn't matter.
Build the brush piles the same year so there's cover while the shrubs grow.

Protecting your orchard from rabbits

If you've got fruit trees on the same place, read this part. A rabbit patch makes more rabbits, and in winter those rabbits eat bark, including the bark on young apple and crab trees. A tree girdled all the way around is a dead tree.

Distance. Since cottontails rarely feed more than 300 feet from cover (Penn State Extension), we'd put the rabbit patch well over 300 feet from young fruit trees. With the junipers in it, a few hundred yards is better still.
Hardware cloth cylinders. Iowa State Extension: "The best way to prevent rabbit damage to young fruit trees is to place cylinders of hardware cloth around the tree trunks." Stand the cylinder 1 to 2 inches out from the trunk, bury the bottom 2 inches, and make it "extend 10 to 12 inches above the expected snow depth" (Iowa State Extension). Nebraska Extension goes higher, "at least 18 inches above the snow depth" if possible (UNL NebGuide G887).
Think about snow depth. Rabbits stand on the snow. In a drifted spot that can mean a guard 3 feet tall or more. Check your guards after big storms.
Voles too. Voles chew bark under the snow at ground level. The buried bottom edge of the cylinder handles them. Keep the grass mowed short around the trees, and skip plastic or fabric around the trunks, since "voles often thrive under plastic weed barriers" (UNL NebGuide G887).
Deer are a separate problem. A rabbit guard doesn't stop deer. Use a 5 foot by 3 foot welded-wire cage for those. Planting fruit trees for deer too? See our whitetail orchard guide.

Timing it to hunting season

Seasons and limits change, so check current regs every year. As of this writing:

State	Season	Limits	Source
Minnesota	Cottontail and snowshoe hare: Sept 19, 2026 to Feb 28, 2027, statewide	10 cottontails, jackrabbits and snowshoe hares combined per day; 20 in possession	MN DNR; MN Rule 6234.0600
South Dakota	Statewide, sunrise to sunset; check GFP for dates	10 daily, 30 in possession; small game license required	SD GFP
North Dakota	ND Game and Fish lists rabbit as open statewide year-round	No daily limit. Check with ND Game and Fish on which license you need	ND Game and Fish

Minnesota requires an item of blaze orange or camouflage pink above the waist, and the DNR warns rabbits can carry tularemia, so wear gloves when cleaning them (MN DNR).

If you run beagles, I'd space brush piles along the strip. Since a flushed cottontail tends to circle back close to where it jumped (MN DNR), cover along that loop gives it somewhere to go and keeps the chase going. That's my take, not research.

What to expect

The brush piles give rabbits somewhere to go right away. The shrub strip takes a few years to thicken up. Junipers are slow, and the sea buckthorn usually starts suckering once it's settled in. Give it a few years and you should have a patch rabbits use year-round, and if the food strip is right beside it, you'll see the tracks.

Mistakes to avoid

Planting cover more than 300 feet from where rabbits feed.
A skinny strip. Aim for 15 feet wide or more.
Tall, open-bottomed trees. Rabbits need cover at ground level.
Brush piles with one opening.
Fabric under the sea buckthorn. It stops the suckering you're after.
Building the rabbit patch next to your young fruit trees.
Juniper within a few hundred yards of apples, crabs, pears, hawthorn, serviceberry or mountain ash (rust).
Sea buckthorn next to native prairie. It spreads.

Safety and the law

Planting cover is habitat work. Seasons and licensing differ by state, and North Dakota's year-round rabbit season could change, so check current regs before you hunt.
Tularemia: gloves when cleaning rabbits.
Blaze orange or pink in Minnesota.

Ready-made bundle for cottontails

Cottontail Cover Patch: 5 sea buckthorn, 3 Rocky Mountain juniper and 3 golden currant. Hardy to zone 2. It's a thorny, suckering, evergreen-backed strip for small-game ground in the Dakotas and Minnesota. If you're planting for pheasants on the same land, see our pheasant winter cover guide. A wide wildlife belt holds plenty of rabbits too. Check your spot with the cold hardiness calculator.

More planting guides

Sources

Gaudette, M. and Brittingham, M.C. Managing Habitat for Eastern Cottontails. Penn State Extension. extension.psu.edu
South Dakota GFP, Cottontail Rabbit. gfp.sd.gov
Minnesota DNR, Rabbit Hunting. dnr.state.mn.us
Minnesota Administrative Rules 6234.0600. revisor.mn.gov
North Dakota Game and Fish, Other Species. gf.nd.gov
Grand Forks Herald, What's with all the rabbits in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks? (via AOL). aol.com
Sargent, M.S. and Carter, K.S., eds. 1999. Managing Michigan Wildlife: A Landowners Guide, Rabbits. Michigan DNR. dnr.state.mi.us
Michigan State University Upper Peninsula Forestry Extension, Cottontail Rabbits. msaf.forest.mtu.edu
Menalled, F. 2011. Weed Management in Shelterbelts. Montana State University Extension MontGuide MT201104AG. montana.edu
Vantassel, S.M., Hygnstrom, S.E. and Ferraro, D.M. 2011. Controlling Vole Damage. University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension NebGuide G887. unl.edu
Scher, J.S. 2002. Juniperus scopulorum. USFS Fire Effects Information System. fs.usda.gov
Esser, L.L. 1995. Shepherdia argentea. USFS Fire Effects Information System. fs.usda.gov
Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Introduction to Sea Buckthorn. ontario.ca
NDSU Tree Handbook, Sea-buckthorn. ag.ndsu.edu
Alberta Agriculture, Shelterbelt Varieties for Alberta: Sea Buckthorn. agric.gov.ab.ca
Iowa State University Extension, How should I prepare my fruit trees for winter? extension.iastate.edu
University of Minnesota Extension, Cedar-apple rust and related rust diseases. extension.umn.edu
Vermont Fish and Wildlife, Landowner's Guide: Snowshoe Hare. vtfishandwildlife.com