The Tale of Our Radio Station Rabbit Will Make Your Heart Melt

It all started last week. As I drove up to the Sierra Vista station for my morning show shift at Townsquare Media, the sun started rising. The pink skies cast a soft light on the station door.

As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed Chris, our sister station DJ, interacting with something near the ground that I couldn't quite see in front of the door. As I got closer, I saw a Desert Cottontail Rabbit staring intently back at him.

What was happening? Why wasn't the rabbit running away?

Why Was the Cottontail at the Station?

We left her alone and returned a while later. She'd cleared away the loose gravel and topsoil in a perfect circle, revealing a hole and a den about a foot below the surface! I took photos and called my daughter, a wildlife biologist in Tucson.

"Oh, she's getting ready for babies," my daughter told me. "But I don't think they dig holes. Let me do more research and call you back."

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Desert Cottontail Rabbit Behavior in Arizona

This Desert Cottontail was beginning to capture our hearts, and her appearance sent us all down a rabbit hole, if you will. We wanted to know more and understand our fluffy visitor.

According to Arizona Game and Fish, cottontails don't dig warrens or live underground, yet we watched her work on this ground structure.

We planted a young sapling nearby and have been watering it almost daily. The surrounding ground is soft, making it easy for Mama Bunny to stir up the topsoil, exposing a natural cavity.

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Cottontails typically seek shelter in brush piles, hedgerows, gullies, natural cavities, or in dens that other animals have abandoned.

The Arizona Sonora-Desert Museum says, "Female cottontails can breed at 3 months of age and have multiple litters in a year. Young stay at the nest for about 2 weeks before venturing off."

Cottontails typically have two to four offspring in a litter but can have as many as twelve. And they're very prolific; cottontails can have up to five litters a year.

Baby Cottontail Facts

We watched Mama Bunny get ready to welcome her kits.

Baby cottontails, according to Enviroliteracy.org, are born blind and hairless and stay in the nest for two to three weeks. During that time, they rely solely on their mother's milk.

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When the babies are about three or four weeks old, they are weaned, and they begin venturing out on their own and no longer rely on their mother.

The K101 Cottontail Bunny Gets a Name

If "Mama Bunny", as I was beginning to refer to her, was going to be part of our station family, even for a little while, she needed a name. We put it to our listeners on social media, and we had a lot of opinions on what she should be called.

There were ideas to name her after famous rabbits, like Bugs, Lola, or Jessica. Others chimed in with Kay-Bun-Oh-Bun (a play on our station moniker, K101), Bun-O Mars, Hare-iette, and many more wonderful ideas.

The top suggestions were:

• Cyndi Hopper
• Donna Van (an homage to our long-time station DJ Donovan, who passed away last year)
• Kay Bun-Oh-Bun
• DJ Flopsy
• Miss Mollie

Of the five on the list, our listeners voted and decided her name would be Cyndi Hopper!

Cyndi and her brood have moved on, but she and her babies captured our hearts here in Sierra Vista, and we'll never forget her!

Sources: Arizona Game and Fish | Arizona Sonora-Desert Museum | Enviroliteracy.org