New York Rabbit Season 2026–27: Dates & Bag Limits

✓ Verified · New York State Department of Environmental Conservation · Last verified 2026-08-15

ℹ Publisher's note. RE-CHECKED 2026-08-15 with a materially better source than the prior pass. DEC's own Small Game Seasons web page still presents cottontail rabbit and snowshoe hare dates only as maps/graphics, but the same data is also published as a table (WMU codes overlaid on a map, dates/limits in a separate text block) inside DEC's '2026-2027 New York Hunting & Trapping Guide' PDF (dec.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2024-07/htgsmallgamehunting.pdf — the file path still carries a 2024-07 upload date, but the document's own header reads '2026-2027 New York Hunting & Trapping Guide', confirming it is current). Fetched as raw binary and extracted locally with `pdftotext -raw` (a `-layout` pass first, then a `-raw` pass which separated the interleaved map/table content far more cleanly and was used as the authoritative read). The Cottontail Rabbit table has THREE rows, not two as this file previously recorded: 'Oct. 1 - Mar. 21' (bag 6), 'Oct. 1 - Feb. 28' (bag 6), 'Nov. 1 - Feb. 28' (bag 6) — the first row was previously missing entirely from this file. The Varying (Snowshoe) Hare table independently lists its own 'Oct. 1 - Mar. 21' (bag 6) as its first row too — both species sharing the identical broadest date/bag combination as their first row (mirroring the same broadest-zone-first pattern already confirmed for squirrel in this project, which lists Sept. 1-Feb. 28 as its first, broadest row) is what gives confidence this is a real, correctly-extracted zone tier and not a PDF-extraction artifact bleeding between the two adjacent tables. This is read as the Northern Zone for both species, correcting the previous 'Mar. 15' end date (sourced from a Sept. 2025 press-release paraphrase, not a primary table) to the guide's own 'Mar. 21'. The hare table's remaining two rows, 'Dec. 14 - Feb. 28' (bag 2) and 'Jan. 1 - Jan. 31' (bag 2), are new to this file — these directly explain the previously-vague 'hare reportedly 6/day in Adirondack-area WMUs vs. 2/day in some other WMUs' bag-limit note with real, primary-sourced dates instead of a secondary aggregator's ratio claim. A fourth bag-limit value, 'Closed', appears immediately after the hare table's three season-date rows — meaning a fourth WMU group is closed to snowshoe hare hunting entirely; no equivalent closed entry exists in the cottontail table, so cottontail rabbit is not closed anywhere in the state. None of these WMU-to-tier assignments could be resolved from the map-graphic layout (the WMU number codes are placed as scattered map labels, not tied to table rows in the extracted text) — hunters should confirm their own WMU against DEC's interactive small-game hunting map before relying on which tier applies to them. Cottontail's Upstate/NYC start-date split (Oct. 1 vs. Nov. 1) is retained from the prior pass's DEC press release, consistent with and not contradicted by this table. Daily bag limits for both species are now HIGH confidence (directly quoted table values) rather than the prior pass's secondary-aggregator sourcing. Shooting hours remain confirmed with HIGH confidence directly from DEC's own sunrise-sunset reference page (dec.ny.gov/things-to-do/hunting/hunting-trapping-regulations/sunrise-sunset-table): 'All Shooting Hours are Sunrise to Sunset, Except: ... Big Game — 1/2 hour before sunrise to 1/2 hour after sunset.' Small game (rabbit, hare) is not listed among the exceptions, so it falls under the general sunrise-to-sunset rule with no half-hour buffer.