CHEBEAGUE ISLAND — Brambles are often a nuisance to be avoided, but a handful of Chebeague Island students braved the densest thicket this winter to find evidence of New England’s answer to Br’er Rabbit. Shortly after a fresh snow, the students and a few intrepid adults sifted through the brambles on Greater Chebeague Island to try and find evidence of the New England Cottontail on the island.
The animal is being considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and this romp through the island brush was part of a larger effort to find potential cottontail habitat.
Children know how to have fun in the thicket, said Beverly Johnson, a regular organizer of Chebeague Island School field trips.
“You’re tangled up in the bittersweet. It was fun, the kids enjoyed it,” she said.
This wasn’t just a pell-mell tromp in the snow, but an organized and trained search party.
The students travelled off-island for training in Yarmouth on how to track the New England Cottontail, organized by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. There they learned how the cottontail, Maine’s only native rabbit species, is smaller than the snowshoe hare and doesn’t turn white in the winter. They studied how to properly document rabbit tracks and even practiced tracking rabbit scat, essential for DNA identification, during the training; Coco Puffs stood in for the scat.
It’s long been rumored that remnants of the cottontail population might be hanging on in Chebeague’s group of islands. The rabbit needs undeveloped land that also hasn’t grown up too much, and the islands are perfect for that, said Leila Bisharat, vice-president of the Cumberland and Chebeague Land Trust. The sea spray from the coastline stunts growth to keep habitat at bush-level along island coastlines.
Bisharat said the land trust is blessed with having enthusiastic volunteers like the Chebeague students to document and protect wildlife.
“We are very fortunate on Chebeague and the other islands that make up the town of Chebeague that they have some very dedicated young and old stewards of the islands,” Bisharat said.
This winter hasn’t been the best for tracking the cottontail on the islands. Snowfall has either been too heavy or poorly timed. There is a window of 24 hours to 36 hours after a fresh snowfall to capture DNA from scat or the tracks of a cottontail. While the students couldn’t find clear evidence of the cottontail on the island, it didn’t curb their enthusiasm for the project.
“We saw two kinds of droppings and tracks, lots of deer tracks and droppings, and a lot of Coco Puffs and branches that the rabbits had nibbled,” said Bea Crossman, a student at the school.
Johnson and Bisharat hold out hope that they can still fit in another survey and find evidence of cottontails to reward the efforts of the students. They’ve only covered a fraction of the possible habitat for the rabbits on Greater Chebeague, and haven’t really touched the other islands.
“We’re looking for the little needle in the haystack,” said Bisharat. “I think we’re going to be at this for a while. They’re elusive little fellows.”
Chebeague Island fellow Celia Whitehead contributed additional reporting for this story.