Arctic Hare

The Arctic hare, Lepus arcticus, is often called the Arctic rabbit or Arctic bunny, but it is a hare, and no wild rabbit lives on the Arctic tundra. Hares and rabbits belong to the same family, the Leporidae, but they differ in a few clear ways. Rabbits are born naked and blind in a burrow, while Arctic hare leverets are born fully furred, with their eyes open, and can move around within minutes. Hares are also larger, have longer hind legs and live above ground instead of in warrens. The Arctic hare has shorter ears than most hares, which helps it hold on to body heat, and that is part of why it looks so much like a big, round bunny. The species was described by John Ross in 1819. Some older books grouped it with the mountain hare of Europe and Asia, but today it is treated as its own species, separate also from the Alaska hare. In Inuktitut it is called ukaliq.

The Arctic hare is one of the biggest hares on Earth. Adults usually measure 46 to 70 centimeters from nose to rump, with a short tail of about 4 to 10 centimeters, and most weigh between 2.5 and 6.8 kilograms. That is roughly twice the weight of a snowshoe hare and several times heavier than a wild rabbit. The ears are tipped in black and are shorter than those of hares from warmer places, and the hind feet are long and wide, with thick pads of fur on the soles that work like snowshoes and grip on ice. Strong, slightly curved claws on the front feet help it dig through hard snow. The fur is long and dense, with a soft underfur covered by longer guard hairs, so the hare can look even larger than it really is, especially when it fluffs up against the wind. Hares from the high Arctic islands tend to have longer, straighter incisors that they use like tweezers to pull small plants out of rock cracks and frozen ground.

What an Arctic hare looks like in summer depends on where it lives. In the southern part of its range, in Newfoundland, Labrador and along the coasts of Hudson Bay, it molts twice a year. In late spring it trades its white winter coat for a short summer coat that ranges from gray to cinnamon brown, which blends with rocks, moss and dry grass once the snow melts. In autumn it grows a thick white coat again. The change is set off by day length, not by temperature, so the timing stays about the same each year even when snow comes early or late. Farther north the story is different. On northern Baffin Island, Ellesmere Island and in most of Greenland, summer is so short that the snow free season lasts only a few weeks, and the hares stay white all year. Even white hares keep the black tips on their ears in every season, and in the high Arctic summer their white shape stands out clearly against bare rock, which makes them easy to spot from a distance.

The Arctic hare lives only in northern Canada and Greenland. In Canada it ranges across Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, northern Manitoba, northern Quebec, Labrador and the island of Newfoundland, including the Canadian Arctic Archipelago with Baffin, Victoria, Banks and Ellesmere islands, and it reaches the shores of Hudson Bay around Churchill. In Greenland it lives in the ice free areas. The Newfoundland population is the southernmost and lives in the Long Range Mountains, Gros Morne National Park and other exposed barrens. Its habitat is open tundra, rocky slopes, plateaus and coastal lowlands, from sea level up to about 900 meters, usually where wind keeps some ground clear of deep snow. In the south it also uses shrubby areas at the edge of the tree line, but it avoids dense forest, home of the snowshoe hare. In the far north it survives near Alert, the northernmost permanently inhabited place on Earth.

The Arctic hare is a herbivore, and its most important food is Arctic willow, a tiny shrub that creeps along the ground and rarely grows more than a few centimeters tall. It eats the leaves, buds, bark and roots of the willow, and in many places this one plant makes up most of its diet. It also feeds on crowberry, saxifrage flowers, grasses, sedges, mosses and lichens. In summer it grazes on fresh shoots, flowers and berries, and the extra food helps it build fat for the long winter. In winter almost everything is buried, so the hare looks for windswept ridges where the snow is thin. Its sense of smell guides it to plants under the snow, and it digs down with its front claws to reach them. Like other hares, it also eats some of its own soft droppings to absorb more nutrients from a poor diet. It can survive for long stretches on very low quality food, a key skill in a place where plants grow for only a few weeks a year.

Most of the year Arctic hares live alone or in small numbers, but they are one of the very few hares that sometimes gather in big groups. On Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands, groups of dozens to a few hundred hares have been seen feeding and resting together, mostly in late winter and spring. When one hare spots danger and runs, the whole group bolts, so each animal can spend more time eating and less time watching for wolves. Scientists still do not fully know why these groups form. The Arctic hare is also famous for how it moves. When it is alarmed it stands upright on its hind legs to look around, and hares in the high Arctic can hop on their hind feet alone, like a small kangaroo. It does not hibernate: it rests in hollows behind rocks or digs shelters in the snow to escape the wind. Some hares also travel far. In 2019 researchers fitted collars on hares near Alert, and one female covered 388 kilometers in 49 days, the longest journey ever recorded for a hare or rabbit.

Arctic hares breed once a year, in spring, when the days grow long. In April and May males follow and compete for females, and hares can rise on their hind legs and box with their front paws. After a pregnancy of about 50 to 53 days, the female gives birth in May, June or early July, depending on how far north she lives. She chooses a sheltered spot, such as a shallow hollow behind a rock or among moss, sometimes lined with fur. A litter usually has 2 to 8 young, with an average of about 5, which is more than most hares have. The babies, called leverets, weigh around 100 grams at birth and arrive fully furred and with their eyes open. After a few days they spread out and hide on their own, which makes it harder for a predator to find them all. The mother returns to nurse them for short visits. The leverets grow fast during the brief summer, are weaned at around 8 to 9 weeks, and by autumn they look almost like adults. They can breed the following spring.

The Arctic hare survives winters where temperatures can drop below minus 40 degrees and the sun does not rise for months. Its winter coat is one of the best insulators of any mammal its size, with a dense underfur topped by long guard hairs that trap warm air and shed moisture. A round body, short ears and short limbs mean less skin exposed to the cold, so less heat escapes. The thick fur on the soles keeps the feet from freezing and spreads the hare's weight so it does not sink into the snow. During the brief summer the hare eats as much as it can and stores fat, which works both as fuel and as extra insulation. In winter it saves energy by keeping still for long periods, sitting hunched with its feet and ears tucked against its body. When the wind is strong it shelters behind boulders or in snow hollows it digs itself, and in bad weather hares sometimes huddle together. Its white coat hides it from predators through months of snow and the dim light of the polar winter.

The Arctic hare has few enemies, but they are skilled hunters. The Arctic wolf is its main predator in the high Arctic, and on Ellesmere Island hares are one of the most important prey for wolves along with musk oxen. Arctic foxes and red foxes hunt hares too, especially leverets in summer. From the air the gyrfalcon and the snowy owl attack, mostly young or careless animals. The hare's defenses are its camouflage, its sharp senses and its speed. It often freezes and trusts its coat to hide it, then bursts away in a zigzag run when a predator gets too close, quickly reaching around 60 kilometers per hour over open ground. Living in groups at certain times of year also helps, since many eyes spot a wolf sooner. People are part of the picture as well: Inuit and other northern communities have hunted Arctic hares for meat and fur for a very long time, and hunting is still allowed under local rules. Unlike the snowshoe hare, the Arctic hare does not show sharp ten year population cycles.

The Arctic hare is not endangered. The IUCN lists it as Least Concern. It has a huge range across northern Canada and Greenland, much of it far from roads and towns, and there are no major threats to the species as a whole. Nobody knows how many there are, because few places have ever been counted, and local numbers rise and fall a lot from year to year, depending on snow, food and predators. The territory of Nunavut describes its status as secure. Hunting is local, for food, fur and handicrafts, and is managed under harvest rules. The one population that worries biologists is the small, isolated group on the island of Newfoundland. In 2012 a provincial advisory committee rated it data deficient, because no full survey had been done since 1981, and Gros Morne National Park now monitors it with winter surveys. In the long term, a warming Arctic could bring more shrubs, more competitors and less reliable snow to the tundra where the Arctic hare lives.