Home Range and Movements of the Eastern Cottontail in KansasJanes, Donald W.
Science
Home Range and Movements of the Eastern Cottontail in Kansas
Janes, Donald W.
Cottontails
Schwartz (1941), Dalke and Sime (1938), Dalke (1937 and 1942),
Hendrickson (1936), and Allen (1939) estimated the home range of the
cottontail by drawing, on a map, straight lines that connected all
marginal points of capture in live-traps. The resulting home ranges
were polygonal figures. Haugen (1942) altered this method by drawing
lines that connected points midway between the actual points of capture
and the next outermost traps in the grid. Fitch (1947) used a method
for enclosing all points of capture in a circle or ellipse that
represented the home range boundaries and expressed home range as the
diameter of these figures. Another method, which has been used to
determine the home range of birds, is to map the movements of an
individual as it is observed. Stebler (1939) suggested the use of
tracking records to determine home range. Connell (1954) expressed home
range of cottontails as the average distance traveled from a computed
center of activity. The method was originally proposed by Hayne (1949).
The methods used by other investigators to calculate the home range of
the cottontail have yielded estimates varying from 0.1 acre to 100
acres. Such wide variations in the estimated size of home range may
result from the use of different methods and from insufficient data.
The data obtained from live-trapping are not fully adequate because
traps cannot sample, in time and space, the entire home range of an
individual. Also, "trap habit" or "trap shyness" may distort the
apparent shape of the home range. In order to compare these methods I
have calculated home range from my data by each of five different
methods. The results are shown in Table 1.
No two methods yielded exactly the same results. To utilize all
available data for each individual, I recorded on a map the locations
of capture in live-traps, nests and forms, locations where the animal
was observed in the field and the routes that it took between them. At
the end of the study a line was drawn on the map to enclose the areas
where the cottontail was known to have been.
Live-traps were operated intermittently at 130 stations between
December 8, 1954, and February 10, 1956. Sixteen cottontails were
marked in the same area by Robert L. Packard in 1954. Data from 7850
trap nights were used in this study. The traps were set at fifty-foot
intervals and the pattern approximated that of a grid in habitat
favorable for cottontails such as at edges of woodland. In wooded areas
traps were placed at fifty-foot intervals parallel to the edges. Traps
were not set on areas of poor habitat where neither cottontails nor
their sign were observed.
The traps were operated eight to twelve days and closed for two to five
days intermittently throughout the trapping period except in the months
of April to August, 1955, when trapping was unsuccessful because the
cottontails then were not attracted by bait.
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