Last year, when we first
arrived here in Mound City, we often would see these small rabbits in the
neighborhood and on the golf course. As winter approached we didn’t see them as
often, however I do remember one often sought cover under our front porch
during snow storms. Now that it is Spring, we are seeing more of the rabbits
again. Looking out the back window this last week and watching the rabbits, I
determined it is mating season. These rabbits are much smaller than the jack
rabbits we see out west, and smaller than the snowshoe rabbits that you
occasionally see in the mountains.
As we watched the
rabbits chasing each other last week and seeing that their tails looked like
little balls of cotton from the back, I thought they must be cottontails. I
looked them up on Google and sure enough they are eastern cottontail rabbits. They are very
plentiful out here and apparently provide food for a variety of predators,
including coyotes and hawks.
I think I was kind of
fascinated with the cottontail rabbit, because it caused me to remember a
childhood song with the words, “Here comes peter cottontail hopping down the
bunny Trail”, and childhood stories about Peter Cottontail. However, I also may
be confusing it with the Story of Peter Rabbit who had a brother named
Cottontail.
Peter Cottontail
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be
confused with the Beatrix Potter character, Peter Rabbit.
For the
popular Easter song, see Peter Cottontail
(song).
Peter Cottontail is a name temporarily assumed by a fictional rabbit named Peter Rabbit in the works of Thornton Burgess, an author from Springfield,
Massachusetts.[1] In 1910, when Burgess began his Old Mother West Wind series, the cast of animals included
Peter Rabbit. Four years later, in The Adventures of Peter Cottontail, Peter
Rabbit, unhappy at his plain-sounding name, briefly changed his name to Peter
Cottontail because he felt it made him sound more important. He began putting
on airs to live up to his important-sounding name, but after much teasing from
his friends, soon returned to his original name, because, as he put it,
"There's nothing like the old name after all." In the 26-chapter
book, he takes on the new name partway through chapter 2, and returns to his
"real" name, Peter Rabbit, at the end of chapter 3. Burgess continued
to write about Peter Rabbit until his retirement in 1960, in over 15,000 daily
syndicated newspaper stories, many of them featuring Peter Rabbit, and some of
them later published as books, but "Peter Cottontail" is never
mentioned again.[2][3]
Harrison Cady, who illustrated Burgess' books,
wrote and drew the syndicated Peter
Rabbit comic strip from
1920 to 1948.
The 1971 Easter television special Here Comes
Peter Cottontail was
based on a 1957 novel by Priscilla and Otto Friedrich entitled The Easter Bunny That Overslept.
In 1950, Gene Autry recorded the holiday song, "Here Comes
Peter Cottontail" which became popular on the Country and Pop
charts and sort of gave a proper name for the Easter Bunny.
