I found a nest of baby rabbits in my yard. What do I do?
The short answer
Leave it. Cover it back up, keep pets away, and do not move the babies.
A cottontail nest with no mother in sight is not an abandoned nest. It is a nest working exactly as designed. She comes back twice a day, at dawn and dusk, nurses for two or three minutes, and leaves again — because a doe sitting on a nest in your yard is a sign that says predator, come here.
The babies' odds with her are far better than their odds with anyone else, including us.
The one number that matters
A wild cottontail is independent at three to four weeks old, and it looks far too small to be. This is the single most common reason healthy baby rabbits get taken from yards.
A rabbit is on its own if it is four to five inches long, fully furred, with eyes open and ears standing up, and it hops away from you rather than crawling. Some rehabilitators describe that size as a tennis ball, others as a softball, which tells you how loose the comparison is. If you have a kitchen scale, over about a hundred grams — roughly four ounces — is the more useful line.
A rabbit that small, out on its own, nibbling clover in your yard, does not need rescuing. It is an adolescent, not an orphan. Unless it is injured or a cat has had it, let it go.
The string test
If you genuinely cannot tell whether the mother is still coming, there is an accepted way to find out.
Lay a few pieces of yarn or light string across the nest in a tic-tac-toe pattern, or a few thin twigs. Space them an inch or two apart.
Do it at dusk. Take a photograph so you are comparing against something real and not against your memory.
Wait through at least two feeding periods — call it twelve to eighteen hours, or set it in the evening and check the next morning.
If the pattern has been pushed aside, she came back. She cannot put it back the way it was.
One honest caveat: an undisturbed pattern is suggestive, not conclusive. A careful doe can feed without moving much. So check the babies too. Full, rounded bellies mean she is feeding them. Thin babies with loose, wrinkled, baggy-looking skin are dehydrated and genuinely in trouble.
You will also see a flour ring suggested online — sprinkling flour around the nest to look for footprints. We do not recommend it. No rehabilitation organization we know of uses it, it cakes in the fur and eyes of newborns, and it clumps in dew or rain and gives you a false reading. Use string.
The mower got the nest
This happens constantly in April and May, and it is fixable more often than people think.
Cottontails nest in a shallow scrape in open ground, lined with the mother's own belly fur and dry grass. Middle of the lawn, mulch bed, under a shrub — places that look insane to us and are perfectly normal to her.
Check each baby for injury, wearing gloves. Injured ones go to a rehabilitator in a covered box lined with paper towel.
Put the uninjured ones back and rebuild the nest in the same spot. Not a better spot. She will not go looking anywhere else.
Rebuild it with the original material — her fur and the original grass — plus dry grass to replace what was lost. Do not substitute synthetic bedding.
If a dog is the problem, weight an upside-down laundry basket over the nest during the day and take it off at dusk so she can get in. Or cut two small openings at ground level on opposite sides, rabbit-sized and not dog-sized.
Then run the string test, and stop visiting.
That last point is not sentimental. Repeated trips to the nest lay down a scent trail that leads predators straight to it. Fix it once, confirm she is coming, and then stay away.
The scent myth, corrected
You did not make her reject them by touching them. That is a myth, and it is worth killing because it makes people abandon nests they could have saved.
Every rehabilitation organization tells finders to pick the babies up, check them, and put them back — advice that would make no sense if human scent caused rejection. She will come back.
What is true is that handling stresses the babies badly, and that your repeated presence attracts predators. So handle them once, do what needs doing, and leave.
If a cat or dog has had one, it is an emergency
Every time. No exceptions. Even with no visible wound.
A cat's mouth carries a large number of bacteria, Pasteurella multocida chief among them. The puncture is tiny, it seals over in minutes, and it looks like nothing happened. The infection is already seeded, and without antibiotics started early it kills. Once symptoms appear, an animal that size has very little time.
Do not re-nest a rabbit that a pet has carried. It needs antibiotics it cannot get in a nest. Warm, dark, covered box. No food, no water. Call.
On the scale of this: a study of nearly nine thousand cottontail admissions across New York rehabilitation centers found that about thirty-two percent of them — roughly one in three — came in from a dog or cat attack. It is the single largest reason baby rabbits end up in our hands.
Why we would rather you not bring us a healthy rabbit
We are being straight with you here, because it affects what you decide to do.
Cottontails are the hardest common species to rehabilitate. In that same New York study, the release rate for eastern cottontails was about forty-five percent, against sixty-five percent for gray squirrels at the same facilities. A 2023 review of the published literature on infant cottontail care found the evidence base thin and the protocols inconsistent between rehabilitators — this is a species where even the professionals do not fully agree on the right method.
The reasons are stress and gut. Rabbits die of capture myopathy, which is a real physiological cascade brought on by fear, not a figure of speech. And their digestive systems destabilize easily, with diarrhea, coccidiosis and gut stasis all common causes of death in care.
The House Rabbit Society's estimate is that fewer than one in ten orphaned rabbits taken in by well-meaning members of the public survives the week. We cannot trace that number to a study, so treat it as an organization's experience rather than data — but it matches ours.
A healthy nest in your yard has better odds than any of that. That is the whole argument for leaving it.
When to actually call us
The mother is confirmed dead, or the string test and thin bellies together say she is not coming.
Any contact with a cat or dog.
Visible injury, bleeding, or a limb that is not working.
Fly eggs or maggots on the babies.
Babies with eyes still closed found scattered outside the nest.
The nest is flooded, or in the path of something you cannot stop.
Who we are
Out of the Woods Wildlife Rescue & Rehab is a wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit in Memphis, permitted by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. Rabbits are a species we are permitted for. If you are standing over a nest right now trying to decide, text 901-340-6534 with a photo — that is a two-minute conversation and it usually ends with the rabbits staying where they are.
Walk your yard before you mow, especially March through September. It takes a minute and it prevents most of what we see.
Sources: Wisconsin Humane Society. Wisconsin DNR Keep Wildlife Wild. Wildlife Center of Virginia. Toronto Wildlife Centre. Missouri House Rabbit Society. University of Minnesota. PLOS ONE 2021, wildlife rehabilitation in New York State. Kosmal et al. 2023, Wildlife Rehabilitation Bulletin.
We are wildlife rehabilitators, not veterinarians. TWRA is the authority on Tennessee law.