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Snowshoe Hare

THE SPECIES: Lepus americanus 

snhare.jpgWhite fur against white snow, a snowshoe hare crouches among willow stems. Its presence is betrayed only by black, marble-like eyes that scan the wintry world in a constant surveillance for predators. Too late, those eyes spot a lynx stalking on silent paws. Exploding from cover, hunter and hunted leap, bound, and merge in a flurry of snow. Then the hare lies still.

Known as a "rabbit" to most Yukoners and a "bunny" to some, the snowshoe hare fascinates us with its 10-year cycle of rising and falling populations. It is the single most important prey species in the territory.

DISTRIBUTION

Widespread, and head-scratchingly abundant in peak years, the snowshoe hare has a range that stretches across North America. It inhabits brushy forests from Alaska to Newfoundland, and south into the mountains of the eastern and western United States.

Snowshoe hares occur throughout the Yukon Territory wherever patches of shrub and forest intermingle. While forest is used for shelter from severe winter storms and predators, shrubs are used for food. Some favourite habitats are willow thickets and burn areas with regenerating pine and aspen. Areas like these, often recently disturbed, contain thick stands of tasty, nourishing and accessible shrubs.

Individual snowshoe hares occupy areas up to nine hectares in size, but most of their activity takes place within an area a third this size. As numbers build to a peak in the 10-year cycle, hares spread from pockets of prime habitat to fill every available space. During the 1976-81 hare cycle, densities of Yukon hares climbed from one hare in 50 hectares to four hares per single hectare -- a 200-fold increase.

CHARACTERISTICS

Since the Yukon is home to only one long-eared, fluff-tailed hopper, you can be sure any one you see is a snowshoe hare. Yukon hares weigh one to two kilograms and may reach half a metre in length. Their "snowshoes" are very broad hind feet padded thickly with bristly hairs. Like your own snowshoes, these feet distribute the hare's weight over a large surface area and allow it to move on deep snow without sinking in more than a few centimetres.

The snowshoe hare is a source of food for nearly every mammalian and avian predator of our northern forests. To evade its many hunters, the hare has developed two strategies. The first is camouflage, whereby this species earns its alternate name of "varying hare". Twice a year the snowshoe hare trades its fur coat for another that more closely matches its surroundings.

In winter the hare's silky pelage is snow-white with black-tipped ears; in summer it is rusty or dark brown with touches of cinnamon, white, and black. Since the molts are triggered by daylength rather than snowfall, hares are very conspicuous when snowfall is late or lasts longer than usual.

The snowshoe hare's second escape strategy involves wariness, speed and agility. Large eyes set high on its head allow the hare to see in nearly all directions, while long ears swivel independently to pick up sounds. As long as it is undetected, the hare remains in its hide, forefeet tucked back between hind feet, ready to bound away.

With rear limbs much longer than front ones, the hare's body is built like a souped-up racing car -- high in the back and low in the front. Fused hind foot bones pack a powerful push-off, a reduced collarbone permits free-swinging leg movements, and a skull formed of pitted bones lightens the hare's load.

Once detected, the snowshoe hare leaps into action, jumping, bounding, zigging and zagging. It's been clocked at speeds of up to 50 kilometres per hour, and can cover three metres in a single bound. When pushed, it takes to the water and swims strongly, those broad snowshoes doubling as paddles.

Although often out and about on cloudy winter afternoons, snowshoe hares are active primarily at dawn, dusk, and during the night. In the daylight hours, they rest in shallow depressions called forms, which may be tucked beneath a snow-laden branch or deadfall. There they doze or groom themselves.

During rest periods, hares also excrete and then eat soft, green pellets of partly digested food. In much the same way as a cow or sheep chews and digests its food twice, these pellets go back into the hare's bag-like digestive chamber. In the chamber, additional nutrients are extracted before the hard, fully digested pellets are eliminated.

With evening's approach, snowshoe hares hop from their shelter in search of food along the edges of forests and thickets. So familiar are they with their home ranges that they know every trail, every clearing, and every hiding spot. With their lives riding on the quick escape, they pack snow paths hard and fast in winter.

HOPPING THROUGH THE SEASONS

White spruce needles fall in a circle on the snow as a snowshoe hare moves round a young tree, stripping clean its slender twigs and eating them. At the edge of a clearing, it neatly clips dwarf birch and willow twigs. In a meadow, it digs through the snow to feed on last summer's horsetails, then nibbles at evergreen leaves and shoots of bearberry and twinflower in the woods nearby. Other popular winter foods are the twigs, buds, and bark of aspen, balsam poplar, and lodgepole pine, as well as mats of dr-yas.

As snow cover builds higher and covers low shrubs, hares use their snowshoes to stay on top of it. There they trim and girdle shrubs and trees to heights that surprise summertime strollers. Hares may choose particular foods having above-average protein content, and will stand upright, hop onto low branches, and dig craters in the snow to obtain their favourite dietary delights.

When the fresh winds of late February and March promise spring soon to come, male hares are possessed by the mating urge. Primed and ready a month before females, they leap and race about, burning off their unfulfilled ardour and fitting the description "mad as a March hare!" In late April, when breeding season does start, males become very aggressive and may fight over females.

In the southern Yukon, the first "bunny" litters are born in late May. Unlike true rabbits, which dig burrows and make fur or plant-lined nests within, hares simply drop their young into a shallow depression on the ground under a deadfall or at the base of a tree. However, the newborn hares, called leverets, are more highly developed than young rabbits. They have eyes open, are fully furred, and can hop on their first day of life. Within a week they speed away from danger and begin to feed on plants.

Snowshoe hares are casual parents. The male does not care for the young at all, and the female visits her young as little as once a day to feed them. Each day the leverets separate and find a sheltered spot where they remain alone. They return to a central location at feeding time which, here in the Yukon, is around midnight. Their mother arrives quickly, suckles them for two to five minutes, and then departs. This low-contact parental strategy may decrease the ch-ances of leverets being killed by predato-rs.

In the Yukon, snowshoe hares have up to four litters between May and September, twice as many as in Colorado. The first litter, averaging three young, is smaller than second and third litters, but has survival rates up to twice as high. Later litters may have a tougher go of it because, as young predators grow up, the number of hare hunters builds up steadily throughout the summer.

Our hares also produce more young each year than southern snowshoe hares -- roughly twice as many as in Ontario and Minnesota. It seems that, even though Yukon summers are shorter than southern summers, our longer days affect the hormonal cycle of hares, increasing their productivity. This may be a response to the high mortality suffered by northern hares, compared with lower mortality and more competition between hares and rabbits in the south.

Many juvenile hares die or are killed within the first few weeks of life, and 15% or less survive to breed the next spring. Hawks, owls, eagles, and terrestrial hunters take both adults and young. Chief among the latter is the snowshoe hare's arch enemy, the lynx. However, coyotes, foxes, wolves, fishers, martens, minks, and wolverines also take their toll.

As spring gives way to summer and then to autumn, grasses, herbs, and shrubs sprout, flourish and wilt. So does the snowshoe hare's interest in particular plants as food. Short-term specialists, hares switch onto the nutrient-rich new growth of boreal forest plants in the order that it appears. Grass shoots green the forest floor first, and the hare devours them. Sprouts of bearberry, horsetails, and the new leaves of lupine and willows follow as the growing season wears on. When the frosts and storms of September and October whip bright leaves to the ground, the snowshoe hare is once again left with its winter menu of twigs and dormant shoots.

THE TEN-YEAR CYCLE

Like small ghosts on a winter's night, snowshoe hares race and bound in a clearing, their tracks covering the snow. A few years later the hares are gone, and their familiar tracks are rarely sighted. Of all the cyclic ups and downs of animal populations in subarctic regions, it is the 10-year cycle of the snowshoe hare that is the most striking.

The hare cycle ranges from eight to eleven years in length. It happens at the same time across thousands of miles of snowshoe hare range. Here and there, isolated hare hotspots appear, then spread like a wave across the land, to be followed in a few years by the crash. The timing of the rise and fall of hare numbers is the same, within one or two years, over all of Canada and Alaska. Yet, in the most southern part of its range, where ecosystems are more stable and diverse, the population does not cy-cle at all. Population densities in those regions are only moderate by Yukon standards.

Yukon hare densities in the last cycle began to increase in 1984 and peaked during 1989-90. Hare numbers began to decline during the winter of 1990-91.

Like snowshoe hare populations in Alberta and Minnesota, Yukon hares had peak spring densities of two to four hares per hectare. However, our lowest hare densities were ten times lower than in the more southern areas. As well, numbers of Yukon hares dropped from peak to low in only two years, much faster than the three years in Minnesota and four in Alberta. Why? Perhaps it is because a simpler food chain in the north leads to higher death rates.

Just what is it that drives the snowshoe hare cycle? This question has puzzled northerners and scientists for generations. On a broad scale, it may be the 22-year sunspot cycle and its effects on boreal forest weather patterns or forest fires. On a narrow scale, it may involve disease or the production of toxins by some of the hare's favourite shrubs. Two vital components in the cycle equation are known to be food supply and predation.

An on-going study at Kluane Lake has shown that food does not have to be in short supply for hare numbers to decrease. It has also shown that predation claims most hare lives in the winter following peak numbers. Key questions being asked at Kluane now concern the interaction of food supply, predation, and the survival of young hares.

The ups and downs of the snowshoe hare cycle affect more than just one species. During peaks, hares may compete with moose for browse. The lynx, another snow walker, feeds almost exclusively on hares, its numbers shadowing the rise and fall of the hare population. The coyote population also cycles here in the north, but being a more general hunter, the coyote is affected less by hare cycles than the lynx. Other mammalian predators are affected even less.

However, when hares are scarce, other prey are sought by all of the hare hunters. Like a ripple that spreads from a single stone thrown in the water, the good and bad fortunes of the snowshoe hare touch every part of the boreal forest ecosystem.

SNOWSHOE HARES AND PEOPLE

Snowshoe hares have always been an important food source for Yukoners in remote areas and are still our most popular small game species. In the old days, Indians sometimes starved when rabbits were scarce. But when hare numbers soared, the people joined together to herd them like caribou into snares. They built long, low, fences of brush that came together in a V-shape, or stretched straight fences end to end. Then, shouting and beating the brush with sticks, the hare hunters drove their panicking quarry into snares set in the fences. The snowshoe hares provided not only food, but warmth as well. Their skins were peeled off in lo-ng strip-s and woven into blankets and parkas that were light and warm.

VIEWING OPPORTUNITIES

Your chances of spotting snowshoe hares will depend largely on which phase of the 10-year cycle they are in.

Remember too that hares are usually active in the twilight or dark hours and sit tight during the day. Forest edges are good places to look for hares, especially in spring and fall when their coloration may not match snow conditions. In summer, hares often feed in roadside ditches at dusk, allowing for great viewing on our long summer evenings. In winter, go for a daytime walk in the woods and see if you can spot a black-marble eye before a hare bounds away from beneath log, bush, or tree.

Hares leave plenty of obvious sign. In thickets and forests, look for well used trails a hand's width across. Trails are especially noticeable in winter. Look also for forms under a deadfall or at the base of a tree. There you'll find lots of round, brown, pea-sized droppings.

You can tell a hare track from others by the hop-hop pattern and its much larger hind feet. If you're unsure of which direction it's heading, note that a hare's hind feet land ahead of its front feet when it's bounding.

Hare browsing can be identified as twigs clipped neatly at a 45® angle, and stems girdled by hare-sized tooth marks. If you find feeding sign much higher than a hare is tall, remember that snow makes a great elevator for hares in winter.

DID YOU KNOW?

 

Last Updated: December 31, 1969 | © 2008 Government of Yukon | Copyright | Privacy Statement | Disclaimer