On a recent warm spring day in New Hampshire鈥檚 White Mountains, wildlife biologist Alexej Siren found something exciting: snowshoe hare tracks in a fleeting patch of snow.
鈥淲e have these larger hind feet that are out to the side like that, and then the smaller front feet that are behind it,鈥� he said, demonstrating how the animals hop to avoid predators.
It took a tricky bushwhack up and over downed trees and through a bog to get to this place, but we were standing in what Siren said is prime snowshoe hare habitat.
Snowshoe hares change their fur with the seasons and the snow. In the summer they鈥檙e generally brown; in the winter they鈥檙e white.
But as New England sees less and less snow due to human-caused climate change, some so-called 鈥渕ismatched鈥� hares are sticking out like sore thumbs.
Siren is part of a coalition of New England researchers that are studying two ideas about how to help, which brings us to the White Mountains.
This little patch of older forest is full of blow-downs, and waist-high spruce and fir trees are growing up in the space the older trees have left behind.
It鈥檚 dense and difficult to navigate because it鈥檚 hard to see your feet.
Snowshoe hares like to nibble on the protein-rich buds of young hardwoods, but especially spruce and fir. These 10- 15-year-old saplings have low, dense boughs that help the hares hide from predators.
The small trees also create shade and hold onto snow, so the hares can camouflage.
Siren has been tracking snowshoe hare populations in New England for more than a decade, sometimes by catching and tagging the animals, sometimes by counting their pellets on the forest floor. The purpose of this trip was to check some game cameras.
Snowshoe hares have light bones and big feet that make them specially adapted to life on the snow, but their ability to camouflage is also critical to their survival.
鈥淭hey're one of the few color molting species in the world that actually change their seasonal coats from to be brown in the summertime to white in wintertime, to be camouflaged with snow,鈥� Siren said.
However, when the hares are "mismatched" with their surroundings, they lose their ability to camouflage.
鈥淭he classic when we think of them being mismatched is when they're white and there's no snow on the ground,鈥� Siren said. 鈥淭hey've been shown to have higher rates of predation during those time frames.鈥�
But there鈥檚 hope for these animals. Siren says in places like West Virginia, Pennsylvania and even southern Maine, scientists have found snowshoe hares that no longer turn white in the winter.
He has a grant now to study whether introducing some of those hares to New England could help the animals here adapt to climate change 鈥� a solution scientists call 鈥渁ssisted migration.鈥�
鈥淚t's a complicated solution in one way, because it's challenging to move animals across geopolitical borders,鈥� he said. 鈥淪o it's challenging to move them from one state to another. There are also risks to translocations.鈥�
Some of those risks include taking too many of the limited brown hares from the source population, such that the trait dies out there, or putting the precious brown hares in a place where they won鈥檛 thrive.
Siren hopes this assisted migration could become a viable solution in the next decade or so.
In the meantime, researchers at the University of Vermont are looking at another fix in the forest itself.
鈥淲e can actually influence snow behavior a bit by changing the nature of the forest canopy and trying to create conditions where it accumulates and also melts slower than other spots,鈥� said Tony D鈥橝mato, who leads the forestry program at the University of Vermont.
Snowshoe hares love what鈥檚 called 鈥渆arly successional forest鈥� 鈥� those small trees that crop up after a big wind storm, or in the wake of logging.
But D鈥橝mato research on recovering paper lands in northern Vermont鈥檚 Nulhegan Basin and the Umbagog Wildlife Refuge in New Hampshire and Maine has shown that big clear cuts aren鈥檛 the answer here.
鈥淲hat we found is that, you know, those smaller openings with shade around them really do accumulate and actually maintain snow a lot longer,鈥� he said.
In some places, this can be achieved by protecting existing old forests, which go through natural cycles of growth and disturbance because of the weather.
However, those ecosystems are fairly rare in New England, especially on the region鈥檚 private lands.
D鈥橝mato hopes harvesting trees from tiny patches of land here and there 鈥� say a tenth of an acre 鈥� and leaving a lot of the wood behind, can help keep snow on the ground for longer and create the ecosystems that keep the hares safe.
This research is about five years old, and it will take decades to see the full impact. But the early results are promising, he said.
鈥淲e're seeing, on average, over that winter period, up to a foot more snow in those places, and in some times even greater,鈥� said D鈥橝mato.
Part of D鈥橝mato鈥檚 research involved working with commercial logging operations to test the economic viability of doing this sort of work as part of a timber sale.
He said this is a solution that small landowners could ask their forester to put into practice on their land now.
And that鈥檚 important for it to be scalable, because outside of public lands, he said, 鈥淭he only way this work is getting done is that somebody is able to financially pull this off.鈥�
Back in the woods in New Hampshire, Alexej Siren says finding a solution for the hares is about more than saving this culturally significant and charismatic creature.
鈥淭hey're a really important, number one species, a primary species of boreal ecosystems,鈥� Siren said. 鈥淎nd if you didn't have them there, then these ecosystems would collapse.鈥�
It鈥檚 something both researchers are fighting to prevent.
