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Varying Hare — Part 3
Images coming soon.
Much has been written on the change of colour of the varying hare and other mammals and birds, but there are few subjects concerning which more mistakes have been made. We read of the change taking place in a single night, coincident with the first fall of snow and of the actual blanching of the the individual hairs; one statement being quite as erroneous as the other. The change is really very simple. All mammals, in northern climes at least, shed their coat twice a year, acquiring a thicker fur in winter and a thinner one in summer, and in the present species the winter coat is white while the summer one is brown and the individual hairs never alter their colour from the time they appear until they fall out. The change from brown to white occurs in the autumn and for a short time the animal is somewhat 'mottled.' Then in March as the weather gets warmer the snow gradually disappears from the woods, the fur of the Northern hare, probably by reason of the wearing away of the tips and the shedding of the long hairs gets more and more mottled with brown, the change in most cases that have come under my notice commencing at the back of the neck, on the feet and the under surface of the body, and in an astonishingly short time the dark summer coat is fairly resumed. Although belated snowstorms must often give them occasion to regret the loss of their winter coats, taking one year and another, the change seems to be wonderfully well timed, and at most they are really no worse off than those other inhabitants of the woods that wear their dark coats throughout the winter.
When the white people first made their homes in this part of the country they found only these big, long-legged Northern hares dwelling in the uncleared forest, never a very numerous race in all probability in spite of the advantages of tremendous swiftness and a coat which copied the colour of their surroundings at all times of the year.
Preyed upon by Indians, wolves and lynxes and the various members of the weasel tribe, which have since been exterminated, or nearly so, because of the beauty of their fur, as well as their numerous enemies which still survive in more or less reduced numbers, the coming of the white man must have proved rather an advantage than an added danger to this long suffering, thin-skinned defenceless race of animals, and it seems probable that they did increase in numbers to a certain extent for the first two hundred years or so. As recently as fifty years ago they were still common and apparently the only species in Southern New Hampshire, but somewhere about that time the little gray rabbit or cotton-tail made its appearance; no one could tell from whence, though it seems generally to have received the title of cony at first to distinguish it from the other which had always been called rabbit, and though hardly one half as large and much shorter of foot and even more timid and helpless, it now became evident that the larger species was disappearing as the smaller increased in numbers.
I am told that at one time, something like thirty years ago, there were no white rabbits to be found within miles of this place. Then they appeared and even seemed to slightly increase in numbers for a few years only to vanish as before, and it has been that way ever since. At intervals of perhaps seven or eight years they came back in scattered bands and endeavoured to establish themselves in their old haunts but the result was always the same.
Rather more than twenty years ago they were quite numerous for several successive seasons in a neighbour's wood lot only half a mile from here. I can just recall a cool afternoon, which I am quite sure must have been sometime in the last of autumn, when my cousin and I raced up the western slope of those woods with the sunlight streaming in beneath the pines, and the one distinct thing in my memory of that time is the image of a big, yellowish brown hare hobbling up the hill before us. That must have been about the last of their occupation of that place, and up to the present time I have only on one occasion found as much as a track there.
Several years ago our cat caught a young hare of this species, and I think it must have been the following winter that I heard of several having been killed in the neighbourhood.