No matter where I go on PEI this winter – town or country – the most common tracks I see are from Snowshoe Hare. It’s been like this for the past couple of years, and I do think 2022’s Hurricane Fiona played a role. Leaning or downed hardwoods put tasty branches and buds within reach, and fallen conifers provide useful cover (Photo 1).
Hare tracks can look very different depending on the snow conditions, and it’s common for people to misidentify them. Hares have four toes on their hind feet and five on the front, but soft snow and furry feet often make that hard to see. Fortunately, their gait is distinctive.
Snowshoe Hares move leapfrog-style, with their large hind feet landing ahead of offset front feet (Photo 2, from an animal that was moving toward the top of the photo). Once you remember that, you should have no problem identifying even the strangest Hare tracks, with one possible exception.
From time to time, I see people mistaking Red Squirrel tracks for Snowshoe Hare. While Squirrels do have a similar leapfrog-style gait when bounding, their tracks are much smaller than Hare as we saw in last week’s post. That’s one reason why it’s always useful to have something in the photo for scale when asking for track identification.
While Photo 2 shows what I think of as the “typical” Snowshoe Hare track, they can look very different in different snow conditions. In wet or very deep snow, Hares will often splay their toes to enhance the ‘snowshoe’ effect, making tracks look huge (Photo 3). I see these tracks sometimes mistaken for Bobcat, but that J-shaped pattern with two large hind feet ahead of two smaller front feet tells the real story.
You likely don’t think of Hares as having nails or claws, but they do. In the right snow conditions, they register in the track (Photo 4) and it can be easy to think it was made by some other animal. Once again, that distinctive gait tells the tale. Those nails provide added traction in icy conditions, but they aren’t fool proof: even Snowshoe Hares can have an awkward slip (Photo 5)!
Now that you know what to look for, you’ll be able to identify my all-time favourite Snowshoe Hare trail (Photo 6, by Deborah H. Carter in Nova Scotia, used with permission).
Although we often call our PEI animals Rabbits, they are really Hares. Hares have longer ears and legs than Rabbits, don’t live in large groups like Rabbits do, and have young that are precocious (ready to move around as soon as they’re born) rather than altricial (blind and helpless like kittens).
Our Island Snowshoe Hares are also known as Varying Hares for their change from brown in summer to white in winter. Triggered by shorter days in fall, this helps camouflage the animal in winter. Not all our Hares turn white, though, and PEI has a population of melanistic Snowshoe Hares that are nearly black and stay this colour year-round. They’re likely more susceptible to predation in winter, as are white Hares in fall before the snow hits – something we are seeing more and more of due to the later arrival of first snows.
It seems you can’t go anywhere this year without seeing Snowshoe Hare tracks, so keep an eye out for the distinctive pattern when you’re out enjoying PEI untamed!
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