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American Polar Hare
Also called: Arctic Hare, White Hare.
Images coming soon.
- Length
- 23 inches.
- Description
- Hair somewhat curly, white at all seasons except the tips of the ears which are blackish; a few long blackish hairs scattered over the back in summer and the ears and face slightly gray (the allied polar hares of Labrador and New-foundland are subject to a greater change. See below).
- Range
- Northern Baffin Land and the Arctic Islands of North America.
- Range
- Takes the place of the American polar hare in New-foundland.
- Range
- Replaces the American polar hare in Labrador.
- Range
- Replaces the above in Greenland.
The polar hares are the Arctic explorers of the great race of hares and jack-rabbits, who, finding the climate and conditions up there at the top of the world well suited to their tastes, have established themselves, and continue to raise their families and live happily in that wide ice-sheeted country far away from the sun, wearing their coats of winter white from year's end to year's end.
A little farther south the hares put on their brown fur for a few months in midsummer, and in most parts of Canada are six months white and six months brown. The typical polar hare of the Arctic region is a creature of the snow, depending on it for protection against the weather and all other enemies. Its home is a hole dug in a snow drift, or a cranny beneath some outcropping ledge, and its food stone-worts and lichens and the twigs of dwarfed alpine plants as hardy as itself.
In the long dim-lighted winter, at the extreme north, it probably has few enemies to fear, except the little blue fox; and in the few weeks of so-called summer the gyrfalcons and the Arctic owls. But the gray-wolf and the wolverine and the Canada lynx have little fear of the cold and follow the polar hare well up within the Arctic circle.
When it is not looking for its scanty fare of herbage the polar hare sits crouching in its form, careless of the dry drifting snow which often completely buries it while it sleeps. If the gyrfalcon or the snowy owl should swing up in sight against the dark sky, it only hugs the snow the closer trusting to remain unseen; and when the Arctic fox comes prowling along the trail, the hare is ready for a run with him across miles of unbroken snow, just as eager to escape and go on living, as if there were long summers amid green fields to look forward to. It is a little curious that a member of the most thin-skinned and generally incapable race of mammals should be the one to prove itself best able to withstand the hardship of an Arctic life; yet these polar hares have been found living on ice fields over frozen seas twenty miles from the nearest land.
Varieties of the Polar Hare
1. American Polar Hare. Lepus arcticus Ross. Range and description as above.
2. Bangs' Polar Hare. Lepus arcticus bangsi Rhoads. Upper parts gray in summer, ears black.
3. Miller's Polar Hare. Lepus arcticus labradorius Miller. Pelage hair brown in summer.
4. Greenland Hare. Lepus graenlandicus Rhoads. Differs from the American polar hare in the more protruding incisor teeth and other skull peculiarities.