https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-scientists-save-worlds-tiniest-rabbit-180981306/
But in the last century or so, about 80 percent of the wild “sagebrush sea” of the Columbia Basin was converted into farms and ranchland. By the early 2000s, the genetically distinct Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit population had dwindled to just a few animals. Scientists crossbred survivors with pygmy rabbits from Idaho; reared in protected paddocks, the offspring retained at least three-quarters of their unique Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit DNA. Today only a few hundred of the rabbits remain, living in semi-captivity and in the wild.
The pygmy rabbit is the smallest rabbit in the world. Weighs one pound. Very tiny. It thrives on the sagebrush plant for food and has a unique digestive system to digest the sagebrush. I do hope the scientists involved in this program to breed and put back into the wild this wonderful little rabbit and they start thriving. How sad that these wildfires are burning the sagebrush that they need to survive?