What Do Wild Rabbits Eat And Should You Feed Them

As opportunistic feeders, wild rabbits feed on things they find around human dwellings or gardens.

These small and agile animals usually search for food in the natural environment. Still, on rare occasions, they will move to houses and other structures to look for tastier and easily accessible foods.

1. Garden Plants

Wild rabbits live on a diet of different garden crops, such as flowers, shrubs, and vegetables. These animals prefer fresh leaves and sprouts like lettuce, carrots, beans, etc.

Unless you have a garden to feed wild rabbits, the rabbits could damage your backyard vegetation. Therefore, homeowners may need to implement barriers or repellents to protect their plants from these persistent foragers.

2. Grass

Wild rabbits are often found dining where there are freshly manicured lawns. They feed on green growing points, particularly grass shoots and leaves, which are their main diet.

These grass shoots and leaves are crucial for their dietary needs and bowel movements. Unfortunately, if you are the lawn owner, you might have to deal with burnt grass. 

3. Ornamental Plants

Your ornamental plants, such as petunias, pansies, and hostas that grow in your garden bed, may be at risk from wild rabbits.

Rabbits are attracted to tiny leaves and sweet-smelling flowers. They will nibble your garden to destruction if you do not put up fences to keep away these rabbits.

4. Fruit and Vegetable Scraps

Wild rabbits may feed on fruits and vegetables left in compost bins or garbage cans. They are attracted to food scraps, which include apple cores, carrot tops, and melon skins.

Proper disposal and secure composting methods can help minimize unwanted rabbit visitors.

5. Tree Bark

Wild rabbits may feed on soft barks and new sprouts of new plants during winter when there are plants and leaves shortage.

This feeding habit can eventually injure or kill the tree since it disrupts its water supply system. The chewing can also contribute to bark stripping and increase the risk of diseases and pests. 

6. Wooden Structures

If you have put up wooden structures to keep away wild rabbits, your efforts might go to waste since wild rabbits might chew on wooden fences, garden furniture, or stakes. They chew on such study material to prevent teeth growth.

They may also bite wooden stakes supporting top-heavy or climbing plants, affecting the stability of the plants you painstakingly grew and took care of. Therefore, it might be better to use metal stakes or employ methods to get rid of rabbits.

7. Herbs

You might not be the only one consuming the herbs in your garden. Wild rabbits also feed on herbs such as mint, basil, dill, etc. These herbs are tender and palatable to rabbits, which they can feed on without restraint.

If possible, grow your herbs on raised garden beds, out of reach from these wild rabbits. Rabbits cannot climb high places unless they get lucky or receive help.

8. Leafy Greens

Wild rabbits are particularly fond of spinach, kale, Swiss chard, and other related plants. If you have a vegetable plot in your yard, you should protect it with chicken wires or mesh shields.

Otherwise, there might not be any left for your consumption because it will not take wild rabbits much time to destroy your entire vegetable plot. The worst part about all this is that there might not be any healthy saplings left for you to salvage your garden. 

9. Clovers

If there is one thing you can allow wild rabbits to eat in your yard, it is clovers. There are pros and cons of clovers in your garden. However, if they have spread to unwanted areas of your outdoor space like driveway, sidewalks, and manicured lawns, you might be dying to get rid of them.

You can let this happen by allowing wild rabbits to feed on the clovers. But note that the rabbits will feed on the grass, leading to bald patches in your lawn.

10. Vegetable Plants

Wild Rabbits might feed on fall vegetables in your yard, like tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers. They might eat the leaves, stalks, and fruits from some of these plants.

Such feeding behavior can lead to crop devastation in terms of quality and quantity produced. Owners can protect their vegetable plants from rabbits using physical barriers and repellents or by selecting rabbit-resistant plant varieties to minimize damage.

Wild rabbits live with their families in meadows, woods, forests, grasslands, deserts, and wetlands. They hide in burrows in hedges and bushes. In the daytime, they leave these burrows to find food such as: 

11. Twigs

Even in the wild, rabbits are herbivores and eat just about any plant material they can find. They eat grass mostly, but during scarcity, they feed on fine branches of shrubs and trees. These twigs provide necessary fiber and aid in wearing down their constantly growing teeth.

However, twigs are not nutritional enough for wild rabbits. They need to feed on other nutritional plant material to maintain a balanced diet. 

12. Woody Shrubs

Wild rabbits feed on the leaves and twigs of shrubs such as sumac, honeysuckle, and dogwood shrub. These shrubs act as a source of nutrients and dietary fiber. Rabbits feed on these shrubs, especially during some seasons, such as the fall and winter seasons.

Nevertheless, their feeding harms several shrubs, even stripping branches and impairing the health of plants in the general environment,  that may lower the growth and reproduction of plants.

13. Root Vegetation

Wild rabbits also burrow and feed on the tubers of different plants. Tuberous crops are the source of energy and nutrients when the aerial parts are not readily available.

Mounding is another activity of rabbits where they dig the soil and uproot plants, causing major interferences. This feeding practice assists them in enduring unfavorable environments but occasionally leads to the destruction of plants and the disruption of ecosystems.

14. Seeds

Wild rabbits feed on seeds of different plants, such as flowers and grasses. Seeds are important inputs of proteins and energy that assist rabbits in combating the effects of the various seasons.

They feed on seeds either on the floor or within plant structures themselves. This behavior caters to their nutritional needs but has repercussions on plant species since it may limit the seed supply necessary for germination and growth.

15. Fruit

Wild rabbits feed on wild fruits such as berries (blackberries, raspberries) and trees such as apples. The fruits are delicious and can help the children get vitamins and energy for activity.

Rabbits could select fallen and ripened fruits within the late summer and acceptable in the fall. Fruits keep them nourished and healthy, but they cause harm by damaging parts of fruit-growing regions, denying other wild animals and humans fruits.

16. Corn

In cornfields, wild rabbits can eat corn as well as their husks as part of the farming wildlife. Corn is an energy-rich food that is carbohydrate and nutrient-dense, especially beneficial for consumption in the cold season.

The rabbits, in turn, gain a rich and nutritious food source, but the feeding damages the corn, leading to losses to the farmer and possible crop-rabbit conflicts.

17. Dandelion Leaves

Dandelion leaves are probably a favorite food of wild rabbits. They feed on both the leaves and flowers, which are easily available in the wild.

They supply the rabbits with essential nutrients such as Vitamins A and C and provide iron, calcium, and potassium, which they especially need when growing into adults.

18. Burdock

While humans consume the roots of burdock for health reasons, wild rabbits feed on the leaves of burdock, which are rich in fiber and nutrients. Therefore, burdock is a source of vitamins and minerals vital for rabbits’ diet.

Here are additional facts about wild rabbits that might help you better understand the animals wreaking havoc in your garden. 

What Wild Rabbits Eat in Winter?

As animals that live in the wild, wild rabbits are adaptable and can change their diet in winter when food is scarce. The diet includes woody vegetation, mostly barks and twigs of trees, for example, willow, aspen, and birch. 

To survive the wild and the cold winter, wild rabbits have a digestive system that can handle plants and flowers that are poisonous better than most animals. Unfortunately, even with this physicality, many wild rabbits die during winter because there is not enough food for them to eat.

A strange eating habit of wild rabbits is they eat their dropping. These rabbits produce hard and soft, undigested food material. They will reingest the soft one to gain nutrients.

Do Wild Rabbits Hibernate?

Wild rabbits do not hibernate. While other animals hibernate to avoid using up much energy in the cold, rabbits do not hibernate during winter.

Rather than go dormant, they change their behavior according to the season and grow a thicker layer of fur that serves as an insulator.

They are still searching for food, and their diets include woody plants, barks, and fibrous grasses since these are readily available even in the frosty winter.

Most people feed animals out of the goodness of their hearts, but wild rabbits are one animal you should avoid feeding. Feeding is generally discouraged because of dependency issues.

If you feed wild rabbits regularly, they will depend on you for food and stop foraging in the wild. This dependency hinders them from looking for food on their own and can alter their normalcy and capacities. This change will lead to their inability to survive autonomously in their environments.

What You Can Do Instead

Instead of feeding the wild rabbit directly, you can scatter food scraps from your cooking like odds and ends of fruits and vegetables in the yard.

This encourages the wild rabbits to rely on their survival and foraging instincts. However, doing this might attract other types of animals as well.