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The article examines Mississippi cottontail rabbit behavior in home range habitat with regard to breeding season, gender, diel period and usage. It is posited that the amount of movement required for foraging is positively correlated to risk of predation, and that reducing required movement will reduce this risk.

Habitat use patterns are reported for black-tailed jackrabbits, antelope jackrabbits and cottontails in the Picacho Mountains region of Arizona. While all three species selected similar overhead cover for resting sites, cottontails use lower, thicker vegetation more often than jackrabbits. Jackrabbits, however, favored creosote- and mesquite-dominated areas more often than cottontails.

Research on habitat selection in cottontails shows that at the patch scale, the rabbits tend to be vegetative community generalists, with little or no selection behavior. It is only at larger spatial scales that cottontails begin to choose among different land-cover types.