Fauna: Fuzzy long-eared creatures

Going out for winter strolls in the forest is so much fun. Not only does the snow make everything look clean and bright, it adds a pretty trimming to the trees and makes it is easy to visibly detect the presence of the hidden forest dwellers. 

Bunny tracks.    

By the look of the track spacing, it looks like this guy was hopping about leisurely. Apparently when they are running, their hops can be spaced up to 3 m apart. No wonder they can run up to 45 km/h. When I run, my gait spacing is probably only between 50-100 cm.

Hey, bunny, bunny, look at me.  

Good boy! 

As you can see, this one has turned almost completely white for the winter to camouflage with the snow. I was surprised I was able to get so many good photos of this little guy, because being a city girl, I'm not exactly swift and quiet on the feet and was making quite a bit of noise, especially with my puffy snow pants which makes crinkling noises distinctive of the waterproof fabrics. It turns out, it had heard me after all. Freezing in place is one of their strategy when they senses danger. They take advantage of their camouflaging ability first, to access the situation, before running.

Fun facts about the snowshoe hare:
-Their toes can spread out to increase its surface area, so they won't sink in the snow.
-They live in the coniferous areas of the Boreal forest, and are found in all the provinces of Canada.
-They can have up to four litter per year, with a gestation period of only 36 days.

Hare, like moose and other game I will write about in later posts, is a much appreciated food source here. For a city girl,  seeking food always meant going to the grocery store, selecting what I wanted and handing over money. I wouldn't be any good at turning to my environment for food. The skills I have acquired at school are only valuable within four walls. Here in the rural, most families have a culture of passing on their food source seeking knowledge to their children, from skills on hunting, trapping, fishing, berry picking, to cultivating.

Game meat is an important food source for some people, especially those who are of lower income. These people may include those retired, but still healthy, active and capable, or people seasonally employed, or even just people who didn't have the opportunity to advance their education, and thus do not have the skills sought out by the modernized workforce. The irony is that, food source seeking skills are more valuable then my "employable skills" if a disaster were to ever happen. Another reason that catching your own game may be more viable for someone with lower income is that meat at the store is expensive. The price factors in all the labour added to process the meat before it reaches the store display. Processes like bloodletting, skinning, butchering, packaging, shipping, storage and refrigeration until sale all add to the cost of the meat. In addition to paying the cost of processing, food seems to be more expensive in places that are further away  from urban centres. The higher cost is most likely due to shipping, and also with a smaller population, there is a smaller profit margin and businesses need to adjust the prices in order to make it worthwhile to continue offering their service to the community.

Some of my colleagues hunt hares with a bow and arrow! I can't believe that there are still people that hunt with bow and arrow, since riffles are pretty easy to access now that it is mass manufactured. The bow and arrow is probably more for sport. The advantage of hunting by bow and arrow in Newfoundland is that the licence to hunt hare is two weeks longer than the license hunting with gun. The season for hare game is from September to early February. In addition to shooting, people also set up snares.

My colleagues were saying, they need to take me out on the snowmobile and introduce me to Newfie boil up, which involves matches, wood, water, a tin can and a snare. Now I could imagine the use for a tin can and all the other items, but a snare? I had read about snares in The Hunger Games, but I had never seen one or understood how it worked. It turns out a snare is simply a piece of wire, and it would be used as a handle to the tin can. The snare is twisted into a loop where one end is free to slide along the wire. As an animal runs through the snare, they will tug at the loop, making it smaller and smaller as they try to run away.

Here are two examples of rabbit snares.

 Source: schoolofhowto.com "Rabbit Snare"

Source: schoolofhowto.com "Rabbit Snare"

Snowshoe hares are apparently pretty easy to trap. They always travel through the same network of  trail ways, which become really obvious in the winter as they leave behind their tracks in the snow. You would think they would adapt to hide their trails network, but in fact they work hard at keeping the trail maintained.  They keep the trail clear of obstruction in case they needed to escape from predators.

Hunters tie bright coloured ribbons above the snare so that they will remember the location when they come back to check their trap. They need to check their snares everyday to make sure that other animals do not get to it first.

Now why hasn't this bunny changed colours?!

Just last week-end, I bumped into another bunny. Except, this one confused the city girl in me a lot, because from my first photo shoot with the snowshoe hare, I knew that their fur should have all changed to white by now. When I went back to work, I told my colleagues that I saw a brown bunny. They didn't believe me, since they should be white by now. So I showed them my photo as proof. They all looked at it and said it must have been a house pet that escaped, because there is no way that is the wild ones. Later when I was telling the same story to some of my curling friends, it turns out, that bunny is in fact a tamed rabbit, and had escaped two months prior as one of the family was moving away. Since then, my friend Lorna has found it wandering her house, and she has taken to leaving out food for it whenever she can, because the poor thing chose the harshest month to escape into the wild. Lorna hopes that eventually it'll learn how to find its own food. Other are less optimistic. They are sure some other animal will find it before spring.

Fun facts comparing tamed rabbits and the wild hare:

-Hares are born with all their fur and their eyes open, while rabbits are born fur-less and blinded. 

-Baby hares are capable of hopping about right at their birth.  

Poor bunny, he is doomed, since its specie was not meant to survive in the wild. :( At least it would have tasted liberty.