What Is a Wild Rabbit’s Favorite Food?
Most wild rabbits enjoy eating various herbs and grasses. They also eat their first passing of feces, known as cecotropes. These are passed again through the digestive system to extract as many nutrients as possible, then excreted as hard pellets.
A rabbit, such as the antelope jackrabbit, not only dines on grasses and leaves but also on succulents, such as cacti. These succulents provide the animal with most of its water during the dry season. The jackrabbit then switches back to eating grasses during the wet season. Uncommonly, it also eats soil to obtain certain minerals.
The Arctic hare eats woody plants. These include willow, which is its main staple during the Arctic’s dry season, and saxifrage. In the summer, when plants are more abundant, it also eats grasses and dryas, which are low-growing evergreen shrubs related to roses. The hare also eats lichens, flowers, twigs, roots and sea vegetables. It occasionally eats fish or scavenges.
The familiar eastern cottontail rabbit not only eats herbs and grasses but also famously invades vegetable gardens. In winter, it eats tree bark and twigs.
The tiny volcano rabbit’s favorite food is Muhlenbergia macroura, which is a type of clumping grass. It also eats other sorts of grasses and woody plants.
