Washington’s pygmy rabbits are in struggle for existence

Nature’s Journal

By Sharon Wootton | For The Olympian • Published May 03, 2008

The future of Washington’s pygmy rabbits is holding on by a whisker. More accurately, that future remains in the hands of a few researchers and whether enough protected areas can be found to relaunch and maintain a healthy population.

Dr. Lisa Shipley, a wildlife ecologist in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University, is director of the modest Pygmy Rabbit Captive Breeding Facility, perched on top of a rise on the campus.

Pygmy rabbits have received some national attention the past few years, including a page in a recent National Geographic magazine with a photograph of 2-year-old. The life-size photo took up only about half the page.

The rabbits, on the federal endangered species list, are extremely habitat-sensitive: the only native North American rabbit (and the smallest) that digs its own burrow, they require loose soil and a diet of sagebrush.

Unfortunately, that deep soil habitat is scattered, partly because of geology and partly because farmers have converted much of sagebrush country into irrigated fields. The Columbia Basin rabbits, isolated from their kin, gradually became genetically different than Oregon’s and Idaho’s pygmys, Shipley said. Our population eventually succumbed to inbreeding, low reproduction, susceptibility to disease, and predators.

“The last known (state) population was near Ephrata, surrounded by farmlands. We’ve spent the last 10 years trying to reduce the fragmentation of habitat,” she said.

“The Nature Conservancy has been buying tracts. But most sagebrush-steppe species have been declining,” Shipley said.

The remaining pygmy rabbits were captured in 2001 by state and federal wildlife folks and placed on the federal endangered species list; some came to WSU’s breeding program, others were sent to Portland’s Oregon Zoo and Northwest Trek, near Eatonville.

There was optimism rabbits breed like, well, rabbits. Then came the letdown.

“I was surprised how hard it was to get them to breed and reproduce” despite protective pens, special diets, a genetic specialist, sandy loam trucked in from Clarkston and the Palouse for burrowing purposes, continuous monitoring, and sagebrush (90 percent of the their diet).