Variable Hare

The variable hare ( Lepus timidus ), also called “ Mr Blanchot ” or “ Blanchon ”, is a specialist in the camouflage. It has a body more collected than its congeneric, the European Lièvre, in order to limit the calorific losses in mountainous area, shorter ears and broader posterior legs to act as rackets in powder snow. It is an untiring runner which attends all the alpine mediums, at all seasons, in the search of its pitance.

Moults

At the end of October with the beginning of November, delivered variable hare, gray during the hot season, bleaches starting from the ends. That enables him to be better melted in nature and to escape its many predatory, leaving behind him only small droppings, rounds, smooth and glazed. Its peeling of winter, following its moult, becomes white, with a hair longer and richer in sleeping bag, forming a thick and thus hotter flock. Another advantage of its delivered white color is to limit the radiation of heat of the animal. Its more collected form and its shorter ears ensure to him a weaker surface-weight ratio also limiting the calorific losses.

In May, it gives up its delivered winter, covering gray hairs of the back to the head. It is also for variable hare one time of dangers because in the meadows covering tender growths, it sometimes happens to him to forget any precaution. According to the research tasks, this phenomenon of moult is related on the room temperature, the duration of the day and the state of snowing up, the change being started by hormones.

History

The species would have been different during the last quaternary glaciation, the rigorous climate which reigned then on the Europe, had then obliged fauna with important adaptations. The strategy of camouflage of variable hare in made a species with whole share.

This glaciation lasted 100 000 years to be completed approximately 15 000 years before our era, which pushed variable hare to separate in two groups. The first group migrated always more to north towards the Scandinavia, the other group was left trapped in the mountainous area of the the Alps in the center of Europe. Absent naturally of the the Pyrenees its current presence is due to an artificial introduction in 1978.

Its practices

With the difference of other hares, the blanchon has a stomach with any test, and few things reject it, it can for example digest barks of trees and can be purged by swallowing gravels and ground. He attends all the alpine mediums - wood of pines, alder plantations, peaks, fall, lawns, between 1 500 and 3 000 meters - finding in each one a pitance with its taste. It is also able to quickly traverse long distances and the uneven important ones - until more 1 000 meters of uneven.

In normal period, the variable hare is rather very discrete, playing the furtivity rather. If it feels in danger to be discovered, it will spout out like the flash before disappearing quickly with far.

Adapted well cold and to the inhospitable mediums, only the wind and the snowstorms force it with the immobility, and, in spite of the hard winter conditions, it reproduces as of February. The season of the loves is called “bouquetage”; giving up their usual greatest caution, the hares launch out in unrestrained races, then solidify abruptly in an immobility of statue before setting out again also suddenly, after one moment of observation of the neighborhoods.

The female, the hase, can have up to four ranges per annum of three or four small which come in the world covered from hairs, the open and immediately autonomous eyes with the same food as that of the adults. In less than two months, they exceed the kilo. The reproduction of variable hare is important and it can on the occasion reproduce with the hare of Europe, however the hybrids appear vulnerable extrèmement, not profiting from all the adaptations of their parents to their respective mediums.

The life expectancy of the let us blanchons does not exceed three years and half of the young people does not spend the year. Their predatory is the Belette S, the Fouine S, the Hermine S, the Martre S and all the eagle S and others Rapace S. In winter, they are the only ones to run the snow-covered territories and to final, their population progresses only slowly. The cohabitation with the man occurs rather well and the blanchon does not hesitate to seek shelters in the country cottages of mountain pastures or the stations of ski lifts.

The variable hare is caecotrophe, i.e. it produces two types of excrements and that it eats one of between-them.

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