Pygmy Rabbits ? Mt & Id. folks chime in please

The pygmy rabbit is supposed to live in extreme SW Mt. Have any of you folks seen them or their sign in any other parts of Mt ?

That made me giggle.

You mean those ones I call rock rabbits???
I see them at high altitudes

Red,that is a Pika or Cony.There actually is a Pygmy Rabbit.They are supposed to be here but not sure if I have seen one.Our cottontails a smaller than Eastern Cottontails,and I have shot som pretty small ones but they may have been juveniles-not sure.The pictures of Pygmies that I have looked at,just don't look much different than our cottontails.I will have to pay more attention.

I see them here, east Idaho, in the sage brush desert. They live in burrows. I find cottontails in the same areas. I see a lot more cottontails than Pygmy. They’re not easy to tell apart unless you are specifically looking to determine if it’s a Pygmy or a cottontail. There is no season for Pygmy here anymore so I have started looking a little closer before shooting.

Fairly common around Leadore, Idaho, in places. Fairly easy to identify because of the lack of white tail. I'm not familiar enough with the other side of the hill in SW Montana.

Jack

Met a student at UW doing her thesis on Pygmy Cottontails. Gave her some pointers on live trapping them in the giant sage in the Great Basin by table rock. Most notable feature besides size is their ears are shorter about 2/3 what would be normal for a cottontail the same size.

Anybody have a picture?

I am about 65 miles NW of Helena and I mentioned some tracks and cottontails and a man told me " those are not cottontails but pygmys ". I had never known of them until then .I am still not sure they are here . Thank you for the information .

I believe WY has a population also I read something in their rule book about them.

Maps I am looking at,say they aren't as far North as Whitehall.They could be in the area I trap though.Where I operate,there isn't a lot of sage let alone tall sage,which seems to be favored.I swear I have seen small rabbits that looked like them but I don't remember whether there was white on the tail or not.I also,incorrectly called them a cottontail.Pygmy Rabbit as others mentioned.Sorry about that.I need to start looking.

When I lived in the Rigby/Ririe areas of S.E. Idaho we would go out into the sage covered "desert" areas west of Lewisville and Menan/Mud lake to hunt jackrabbits. The Blacktail variety was unbelievably abundant and we would see, literally, thousands of them. There were also Whitetailed Jacks, Nuttall's Cottontails, and a very few Pygmy Rabbits. The Nuttall's were very small compared to the Eastern Cottontail I grew up hunting. Those Pygmy Rabbits were even smaller. That was in the winter of '81-'82, and I don't believe they were legal to take even then. As stated above, they have comparably smaller overall ears than cottontails.....looking sorta like a slightly large Pika with ears a little longer than normal.

they don't look much like cottontail
http://fieldguide.mt.gov/speciesDetail.aspx?elcode=AMAEB04010

Well,not like an Eastern Cottontail but some of the Western species look more like it,except for the tail.

We have a few in the Owyhees. Highway 95 right at the Oregon state line has a parking area with a few dens in the Sagebrush. I used to see more of them before we had wildfires in the area.

I saw a pair of them 3 years ago in eastern Oregon near the Nevada line.

I think the guy who told me they were pygmys is wrong . Just were cottontails .