Snowshoe Hare

Op-Ed, The Boston Globe

January, and twenty seven degrees. Down in the cove the water is emerald green, as though it were midsummer, but we know it’s not. In the garden , the shallow puddles from the last rain are frozen solid. We’ve had some mild weather lately, but now it’s over: the air tastes like iron, and the sky is low and grey. Snow is imminent. We’re all waiting for it.
The garden is ready, everything in it has been cut down clean. Only one clump of tall grasses is still standing, its pale dry stalks whispering and rustling in the wind. Everything else is gone, down to the ground. The short clipped stems are covered with pine boughs. The garden is bare, waiting for snow.
Also waiting for it is the snowshoe hare who’s sitting inside the walled garden, against the concrete base of the house. During the summer, he might easily be invisible there, at the back of the deep beds, shielded by the heavy foliage, the big curved hosta leaves, the dense clumps of ferns. He might be invisible there right now, if it were a little earlier, or later. But right at this moment he couldn’t be more glaringly visible, because he’s made the big mistake, not only of taking shelter against a bare wall, in a flat empty garden, but of disguising himself as a snowbank, in a brown landscape.
The snowshoe hare (lepus americanus) has a system that’s exquisitely attuned to lowering temperatures, diminishing light, and the arrival of winter. Some time in the late fall this hare’s summer-brown coat very sensibly turned white (it’s not his fault we have no snow). Hares don’t dig burrows, and in the winter, a hare may shelter beneath a log, or in the tunnels made by heavy brush covered with snow. But often he will snug himself up against something solid: a tree, a bank, a log, a weather break. Exposed in the open like that, a brown coat against a white field would be a dead giveaway. So, somewhere along the evolutionary time-line of lepus americanus, an ingenious color change system developed, for survival - the shaft of each hair changes, seasonally, from brown to white, and back again.
Our wall seems to be a safe place for this one. It’s sheltered by the surrounding fences, and it’s quiet. The hare sits completely still, against the concrete, as calm and secure as though his bold white coat blended perfectly with its scumbly brown surface. He’s near the front door, and we go in and out, peering discreetly at him.
Our hare sits bunched in a neat rounded dome, the curve of his back high. I expected a hare to be long and low, but he is short and plump, like a teapot. His dark rounded eyes are brown, with a faint tinge of red. His front paws, just visible beneath his snowy chest, are oddly brown, as though he’s got on someone else’s shoes. His narrow ears are velvet brown, and there is the sheen of the shadowy brown undercoat, beneath his snowy overcoat. His nose, too, is a blotch of neutral brown, and there are a few vague streaks of it on his shoulders: the broken lines of camouflage. He’s watching, his dark eye is on me, but he is completely, utterly, still, despite our comings and goings. His ears are tilted slightly up – he’s listening – but they don’t swivel: movement would give him away. Immobility is his protection, it’s movement that draws the eye. His stillness says simply that he’s not here; there’s nothing here.
His color-coding, too, is part of the hare’s survival strategy. But this weather is dangerous for him: he can’t adapt to unseasonal fluctuations, he can’t change color every time the temperature rises in January. The snowshoe hare, like most living organisms, has evolved over time in relation to a reliable weather cycle. Living things rely on a dependable climate, whether it’s temperate, desert or arctic. Deciduous trees, for example, cannot tolerate an early, unseasonal snowfall, while they still have their leaves. The weight of the snow on the leaves is too heavy for their branches to sustain, and they’ll break. The loss of large branches will compromise the tree’s health. Fruit trees, which flower in the spring, require calm, mild spring weather during their blossoming season. Bees won’t fly in high winds, which will rip the blossoms off the trees, so the chance for pollination – and a fruit harvest – will be lost. Warm weather in the middle of winter acts as a signal for plants to use their stored energy and send it upward, producing tender green shoots. A subsequent freeze will kill the shoots, and the plant will need to muster the energy to start over again, later. The energy spent on the winter shoot was wasted. The second or third try may produce a plant that’s small and stunted. Energy is the elixir of life in the natural world; no organism can afford to waste it. Successful survival strategies don’t include false starts.
Unseasonal storms and temperatures put stress on agriculture and fruticulture and silviculture, as well as on wildlife, and plants and animals under stress have a higher risk for disease and infestation. Historically, there have always been unseasonal weather events, but historically they were unusual – that’s why they were recorded. They weren’t the norm.
The emission of greenhouse gases disrupts the layer of atmosphere in which weather patterns are formed. Increasingly, we’re evolving a pattern of unreliable weather, one of unseasonal fluctuations, extreme storms, droughts and floods that threaten the vigor, reproduction and survival of plants and animals.
Our snowshoe hare waits, motionless, against the wall. If it snows again, as it normally would in January, he’ll have protective cover, and the chances will diminish of his being seen by the coyote who trots past, down by the cove, along the shoreline, in the late afternoons. But if we have another winter of fluctuating weather, alternating between hard freezing and unseasonal warmth, the snowshoe hare – and all the trees on the property – and on the island – and in the state - will be in trouble.