The damage shows up in March
Rabbit damage has a particular cruelty to its timing. You do not see it happening. The snow goes down in December, everything sits under it for three months, and when the melt comes in March you walk out and find that the bark has been stripped off the young apple tree in a neat band, that the burning bush has been reduced to a set of stubs, and that the raspberry canes are gone.
By then it is done. A fully girdled young tree is already dead — it may leaf out weakly in May and then collapse in July, but the outcome was decided in January.
This is why rabbit work is almost entirely preventive. There is no treatment, no product, and no removal program that saves a tree already girdled, and no repellent that reliably gets valuable plants through a Wisconsin winter. What works is a physical barrier put on in autumn, plus reducing the cover that holds rabbits on the property in the first place.
Identification: rabbit or deer?
Before you fence anything, establish which animal you are fencing against, because the answers are completely different.
The cut is the test. Rabbits have sharp upper and lower incisors and bite cleanly through a stem. The result is a smooth, angled cut at roughly 45 degrees that looks like it was made with a pair of secateurs. It is unmistakable once you have seen it.
Deer have no upper front teeth. They grip vegetation and tear it against a hard palate, leaving a ragged, shredded, stringy end.
Height confirms it. Rabbit damage stops at whatever height the snow allowed — typically under two and a half feet, and often in a distinct horizontal line marking the snow depth at the time. Deer browse well above that.
Bark damage differs too. Rabbits leave clean, closely spaced tooth grooves and remove bark in defined patches with tidy edges. Voles work at or below ground level under snow, leaving much finer grooves. Deer rub and shred bark with antlers rather than eating it neatly. Porcupines work high on the trunk and out on branches, well above rabbit height.
Droppings settle any remaining doubt: rabbit pellets are round, pea-sized, and dropped in scattered piles under shrubs and along runs.
What a cottontail is, and why they multiply
The animal here is the eastern cottontail, Sylvilagus floridanus — brown-gray, roughly two to three pounds, with the white underside to the tail that gives the species its name.
Two facts shape the problem.
They do not dig burrows. Unlike European rabbits, cottontails do not build warrens. They rest in shallow scraped depressions called forms, tucked under cover, and they rely on whatever shelter the landscape provides: brush piles, wood piles, the space under decks and sheds, the skirt of a dense evergreen, tall grass, overgrown fence lines. In winter they will occupy an abandoned woodchuck burrow. The practical implication is direct — cover is what holds rabbits on a property, and removing it reduces the population you are fighting.
They breed prolifically. Cottontails breed from early spring into late summer, producing several litters a season after a short gestation, and young females can breed in the year they were born. A property with good cover and food can go from two rabbits to a noticeable population in one season. Mortality is correspondingly high — cottontails are prey for almost everything — but the reproductive rate is what makes local control an ongoing matter rather than a one-off.
The winter switch
Everything expensive about rabbits comes down to a seasonal diet change.
Spring through autumn, cottontails eat grasses, clover, dandelion, and soft green growth. It is abundant, it is preferred, and it means your shrubs and trees are largely ignored. People with rabbits in the yard all summer often report no damage at all.
Winter removes that entire food layer. Hard frost and snow cover eliminate the green material, and the diet switches to bark, twigs, and buds — which is to say, to your woody plants. Nothing about the rabbit changed; the alternatives disappeared.
Then snow makes it worse in a way people consistently underestimate. Snow lifts the rabbit’s reach. A foot of snow puts bark a foot higher within range. Drifting against a hedge or a wall can put them substantially higher still. This is why tree guards fail: someone installs an eighteen-inch guard, eighteen inches of snow accumulates, and the rabbit calmly feeds on the bark just above the top of it.
Late winter is the peak of damage. February and March, with natural food long gone and the animals under real nutritional pressure, is when the girdling happens and when repellents are least likely to deter anything.
Girdling: why it kills
Just beneath the bark lies the phloem, the tissue that carries sugars produced in the leaves down to the roots. Strip bark in a complete ring around a trunk and that pathway is severed. The roots, cut off from their food supply, starve.
The delayed nature of it is what catches people. A girdled tree often leafs out in spring on stored reserves, looks fine into early summer, and then wilts and dies in July when the reserves run out. Owners frequently assume disease or drought and never connect it to the bark damage they saw in March.
Partial damage is usually survivable. A strip taken from one side leaves an intact pathway, and the tree will compartmentalize the wound and grow over it in time, though it remains a weak point and an entry for disease.
Complete girdling of a young tree is fatal, with no remedy. Which is the entire argument for autumn guards on anything you value.
What gets hit around here
Young fruit trees. Apple, crabapple, pear, cherry, plum — thin-barked and highly attractive. The single most common and most costly rabbit loss in this area.
Ornamental shrubs. Burning bush, serviceberry, dogwood, viburnum, spirea, young lilacs.
Roses. Reliably eaten to stubs, and often not noticed until spring.
Raspberry and blackberry canes. Clipped off at snow height, sometimes an entire row.
Vegetable gardens. Seedlings and young plants in spring and summer, when green food is available but a tender row is better.
Perennials. Hostas, tulips, and other soft spring growth.
Newly planted anything. New plantings are thin-barked, tender, and unestablished, and they suffer disproportionately.
Windbreak and shelterbelt plantings, which matter a great deal on farms here and are often left unprotected because of the number of trees involved.
How do you know you have rabbits?
- Stems and twigs clipped cleanly at a 45-degree angle
- Bark gnawed from young trunks up to snow height, with visible tooth grooves
- Damage stopping abruptly at a horizontal line, marking snow depth
- Round pea-sized droppings scattered under shrubs and along runs
- Trails or runs worn through grass and snow between cover and feeding areas
- Shallow forms scraped under brush piles, decks, evergreens, and dense cover
- Tufts of fur caught on fencing, bark, or rough surfaces
- Tracks in snow with the large hind feet landing ahead of the front pair
- Shrubs reduced to stubs at a uniform height
Are rabbits dangerous?
Health risk is low but real enough to be worth knowing. Wild rabbits can carry tularemia, a bacterial disease transmissible to people through handling an infected animal or via ticks and biting flies. Wear gloves if you handle a dead rabbit, and steer clear of any animal that appears ill or oddly approachable. Rabbits also host ticks, which is the more practical concern given Lyme disease here — see ticks.
Property risk is entirely horticultural. Rabbits do not damage buildings, do not get into food stores, do not chew wiring, and are not a structural pest in any respect. What they do is kill plants, and the cost can be substantial — a girdled young orchard, a lost shelterbelt planting, or a landscape’s worth of shrubs is real money.
They also den under things, and a rabbit living under a deck or shed is a sign that the void is open — which matters, because skunks, groundhogs, and foxes will use the same space, and those are more consequential tenants.
Why doesn’t DIY work on rabbits?
Relying on repellents. They wash off, they degrade, they need constant reapplication in the worst weather of the year, and a hungry rabbit in February eats treated bark anyway.
Guards that are too short. The most common failure by a wide margin. An eighteen-inch guard is useless under eighteen inches of snow. Account for the snow, then add margin for drifting.
Guards installed too late. December, after finding damage, is after the fact.
Guards left on year-round. They trap moisture against the bark, encourage rot and disease, and can constrict a growing trunk. Off in spring.
Guards pressed against the trunk. A rabbit will compress flexible wrap and reach the bark through it. Stake the cylinder an inch or two clear.
Fences with a gap at the bottom. Rabbits go under far more readily than they dig. The base needs to be buried or aproned outward and pinned.
Chicken wire with large mesh for young rabbits, which pass straight through. One-inch mesh or finer.
Ignoring the cover. Fencing while leaving brush piles, wood piles, and an open void under the deck means fencing against a resident population you are actively housing.
Trapping as the strategy. Removal creates a vacancy that fills from the surrounding population, and relocation is regulated, generally poor for the animal, and ineffective.
How does BugBoss handle rabbits?
1. Confirm the animal. Rabbit, deer, vole, or porcupine — the cut angle and the damage height settle it quickly, and the fencing spec depends entirely on the answer.
2. Inventory what needs protecting. Not everything does. Established thick-barked trees are at little risk; young fruit trees, new plantings, valuable ornamentals, and shelterbelt stock are where the money is. Prioritizing keeps the job proportionate.
3. Specify the barriers properly. Quarter-inch hardware cloth cylinders for trunks, staked clear of the bark, and tall enough to clear expected snow with margin. Two-foot one-inch mesh fencing for beds and vegetable plots, with the base buried or aproned outward and pinned.
4. Find and address the cover. Brush piles, wood piles, dense low skirts, overgrown fence lines, tall grass, and voids under decks, sheds, and porches. This is the part that reduces the population rather than just defending against it.
5. Close the voids. Hardware cloth, skirted or buried, on anything open under a structure — which also handles the skunks, groundhogs, and foxes that would otherwise move in.
6. Trap where genuinely warranted, within state regulations, understanding that it is a supporting measure rather than the solution.
7. Set the autumn routine. Guards on before first snow, off in spring, cover cleared in the same pass. Rabbits are a predictable annual problem, and treating them as a scheduled autumn task works far better than reacting each March.
How do you keep rabbits out?
- Hardware cloth cylinders on young trunks, staked clear of the bark, tall enough to clear the snow with margin. The highest-value item here.
- Install in autumn, remove in spring. Both halves matter.
- Two-foot mesh fencing around beds and vegetable plots, base buried or aproned outward and pinned. One-inch mesh or finer.
- Account for snow depth in every height decision, and add for drifting against walls and hedges.
- Clear brush and wood piles away from the garden, or at least away from what you are protecting.
- Close voids under decks, sheds, and porches — good practice for several animals at once.
- Cut back dense low cover and overgrown fence lines near valuable plantings.
- Keep grass mown in the areas you care about, since tall grass provides both cover and food.
- Protect new plantings from day one. They are the most vulnerable and the most expensive to lose.
- Treat repellents as marginal. Occasionally useful, never the plan.
When should you call BugBoss about rabbits?
Call in autumn, before the snow, if you have young trees, a new orchard, a shelterbelt planting, or valuable shrubs — that is the call that actually saves them, and it is the one people rarely think to make until they have lost something. Call in spring if you have found girdling and want to know what is salvageable and how to prevent a repeat. Call if rabbits are living under a deck, shed, or porch, since that void is worth closing against more consequential animals too.
Brian handles rabbit exclusion across the rural corridor — Clintonville, Marion, Manawa, Iola, Tigerton, Waupaca, New London, Weyauwega, and the farms, orchards, and village gardens between them — where hard winters, deep snow, and plenty of cover make winter bark damage a routine and largely preventable loss.
If the cut ends are ragged rather than clean, you are dealing with deer rather than rabbits. If the bark damage is high on the trunk and out on branches, see porcupines. If it is at or below ground level under the snow, see voles — vole girdling is frequently blamed on rabbits and needs a different response.