Encounter with a Cottontail

Mark Langford, Mark Langford Photography

Mark Langford is a professional photographer who covers everything from food displays and shrimp boats to construction cranes and aircraft. Mark is a first class amateur meteorologist who operates his own weather web site. He also runs an ozone prediction web site that has made very accurate predictions about the arrival of polluted air over his region. Editor.

We live on a one acre piece of land in the Helotes, Texas, area. We developed only about half of our land and left the other half as a green belt to give us privacy and to attract animals, like the cottontail (genus Sylvilagus) in Fig. 1.

During a rather wet spring, in 2001, a section of our property was a potpourri of wildflowers. Every morning and afternoon, several cottontails would gather in the flowers and dine on the plants. One morning, while doing some chores out in the backyard, I noticed this particular subject and quickly grabbed my Olympus digital camera to record this photo. Luckily the rabbit had a rather humorous look to him, which adds some fun to the image.

Fortunately for us, we have not had deer problems in our area. We mainly see cottontails, lizards, coyotes, a few foxes and red tailed hawks that like to feast on the cottontails. The cottontails can be a slight problem in the garden during dry spells, but they usually prefer natural vegetation. We enjoy their presence.

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