The snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) is a member of the rabbit family that is elegantly adapted to cold, northern climates.  Its large hind feet allow it to float on top of the snow as one would with snowshoes.  This feature helps hares escape predation in winter, especially from terrestrial predators whose feet are small relative to their body weight, such as coyotes.  However, the main predator of snowshoe hares, the Canada lynx, is also specialized for travel in snow and is fully adept at catching hares in any season.  In Alaska, hares serve as a major prey item not only for lynx, but also for coyotes, goshawks, great horned owls, and a slough of other mammals and raptors.  Consequently, hares rarely live past two or three years of age in the wild.  

Snowshoe hares in Alaska and Canada may live in wintery conditions for half of each year.  They possess a suite of adaptations to cold, such as short, furry ears to minimize heat loss, and seasonally molting into a white coat of fur that helps them disappear amongst the snow.  Because the onset of this molt appears to be determined largely by day length, the color of a hare’s fur is more frequently mismatched with its surroundings in a changing climate where snowfall arrives later in the fall or melts earlier in the spring.  This makes hares more visible to predators and likely more vulnerable to predation, and is a current topic of climate change research. 

Although most hares eventually succumb to predation, they reproduce prolifically from a young age to ensure the survival of their genes and their species.  In the boreal forest where there is an abundance of contiguous habitat for them, the high reproduction rate of hares can lead to quick population booms that overwhelm the available food supplies.  The vegetation consumed by hares does not stand by passively though.  In response to herbivory, plants increase production of chemical compounds that inhibit digestion or otherwise harm the animals that are browsing on them.  Meanwhile, the rising number of hares supports a growing population of predators, especially lynx, and soon the hares find themselves lacking energy to survive predatory ambushes and environmental assaults.  Hare populations are driven down by predators and an effective lack of food until the predators can no longer sustain elevated rates of reproduction or survival, then they too plummet to reduced numbers.  This, in turn, releases the remaining hare populations from predation, allowing them to rebound.  The oscillation in abundance of hares and their predators, along with a time lag between changes in hare and predator numbers, results in the classic lynx-snowshoe hare population cycles that have been observed in North America for hundreds of years.