West Virginia researching snowshoe hares
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – How quickly can West Virginia’s snowshoe hares adapt to a changing world?
Scientists want to know. To find out, a North Carolina-based team of researchers is capturing adult hares, outfitting them with radio collars to track their movements throughout the coming months.
“The objective of our research is to understand how the species might adapt to big and rapid human-caused stressors such as climate change,” said Scott Mills, a professor at North Carolina State University. “We hope to discover how wild animal populations might be able to adapt to big changes caused by humans.”
Mills said snowshoe hares are a good species to study because their survival depends on camouflage – a camouflage that changes dramatically from winter to summer. For most of the year, snowshoe hares have brown fur. As fall turns to winter and snow covers the ground, they molt their brown coats and grow white ones.
“The change takes place with exquisite timing,” Mills explained. “Hares at higher elevations molt earlier because the winter snowpack starts earlier up there.”
Climate change, he added, has thrown the timing off.
“The single biggest, most predictable effect of climate change is a reduction in the number of days snow stays on the ground. If the snow melts before the hares molt back to their brown coats, what you end up with is a lot of white light bulbs hopping around on bare ground where they’re easy targets for predators.”
Mills and his fellow researchers hope to determine how quickly the hares can adapt their molt cycles to the “new normal” in snowpack duration, and also whether the animals’ mismatched camouflage might someday cause them to go extinct.
“(Researchers have) been working on this question in Montana, in Washington state, in Sweden and in Scotland,” Mills said. “West Virginia is a particularly interesting place to continue the research because it represents the extreme southern limit of the snowshoe hare’s range. Even though the state’s high mountains get a good seasonal snowpack, we might see limits in the snowpack’s duration because it’s so far south.”
Sometime in the next few weeks, Mills and a cadre of student assistants will trap and equip with radio collars at least 10 adult hares. Once that is done, researchers will return periodically to track the animals.
“The idea is to find them and see if their (fur) matches their surroundings,” Mills explained. “So we’ll be thrashing around in rhododendron and spruce thickets a lot.
“The crazy thing is, we’ll be able to walk right up on top of them. That’s evidence of how much they rely on camouflage. They’ll hold still while we walk in on their radio signals, take pictures of them, record their color and record the ground color.”
West Virginia wildlife officials are happy to see the work being done – not necessarily from a climate-change standpoint, but because it should yield much-needed information about the hares’ home range and habitat.
“The most recent map we have of the state’s snowshoe-hare range was created during the 1960s,” said Randy Tucker, a Division of Natural Resources biometrician. “I’d like to update that map, and with the data we receive from the folks at N.C. State, we should be able to do that.”
Mills said an updated map is only one of the “value-added benefits” he plans to share with DNR officials. “As we go along (with the research), we’ll be in a position to tell Randy and the folks at the U.S. Forest Service how the hares are using the landscape, what types of habitat they prefer – information that can be used to help ensure the long-term survival of the species.”
Mills said at least part of that long-term survival might hinge on how quickly hares adapt to the changing conditions so their camouflage better matches their surroundings.
“It’s not a gloom-and-doom story, because the hares might be able to change,” he said. “The question is whether that can occur within just a few generations.”