Antelope Jackrabbit
The Sonoran Desert has an amazing variety of animal species, with a wide range of habitats. Even though the Sonoran Desert is ‘lush’ by comparison to the other three North American deserts (Mojave, Chihuahuan, Great Basin) it is still amazing to see the animal species that have adapted to and are thriving in a pretty dry environment. Our area of the Sonoran Desert (referred to as the Arizona Uplands) has at least two species of rabbits in it. Well, technically one rabbit species and a hare species. The Desert Cottontail looks pretty much like cottontail rabbits you would see all over much of the US. However, we also have at least one species of hare - the Antelope Jackrabbit. A couple days ago, two of these huge, gangly ‘rabbits’ surprised me when I was walking in the desert behind our house looking for birds to photograph. They were cooperative subjects, as shown below.
If you are used to cottontail rabbits, seeing one of these gigantic - by comparison - rabbits for the first time is quite a shock. The Antelope Jackrabbit is the biggest jackrabbit species and can weigh up to 9 pounds - that is a BIG rabbit. Depending on how you measure it, they’re probably two to three times the size of a cottontail - especially when taking their long legs and huge ears into account.
We have LOTS of coyotes in our area and hear them yipping up a typical early or late chorus a large percentage of nights - sometimes within feet of our back yard. With so many coyotes running around, it’s amazing there are any rabbits left at all, whether Desert Cottontail or Antelope Jackrabbit. In the case of our jackrabbit, maybe it partly has to do with the long breeding season that can produce four litters per year.
When I’ve seen these jackrabbits, they seem slow and deliberate, hopping casually about looking for browse. But the long legs give them options for not getting caught by a coyote, bobcat or mountain lion (yes, we have the occasional cougar that wanders into our area from the nearby mountains). They can bound good distances erratically and are fast over short distances at least. Still, I wouldn’t want to be in their part of the food chain.
The laughably long ears serve another purpose besides enhancing hearing. As you can actually see in the image, their ears have blood vessels running through them. This allows the ears to act as a radiator to help regulate the jackrabbit’s body temperature from overheating. I have seen Desert Cottontails scrape a shallow depression in the dirt (in the shade) and then flatten themselves out over it since the ground is cooler than the air, and they lose some of their body heat to cool down. I don’t know whether jackrabbits do the same, but all successfully adapted desert species have to deal with this issue in the hot summers. The ears help in this regard.
There are two other jackrabbit species which could possibly be found in our area, and hopefully I identified this species correctly. The other two possibilities are Black-Tailed Jackrabbit and White-Sided Jackrabbit. I can definitely say this is not a Black-Tailed - although it’s not visible in this photo, when the rabbits hopped off, their hindquarters were very white, standing out almost like a whitetail deer’s ‘flag’ (tail) when it sprints away from danger. Plus the ears of the Black-Tailed are darker than Antelope. White-Sided Jackrabbits prefer higher elevation grasslands and tend to avoid areas with trees and shrubs. The range of both the White-Sided and Antelope Jackrabbits barely extends north into the US - Arizona in the case of the Antelope and New Mexico for the White-Sided. Their primary range is in Mexico.
Hopefully I’ll have some additional opportunities to photograph these interesting critters, although they are mostly crepuscular (early morning, evening) so seeing this pair during the day was definitely a bit of good luck.