Sorry, bunny-lovers: snowshoe hares eat meat including other hares

Snowshoe hares eat meat, and they don't seem all that picky about what kind of animal it comes from.

A natural history paper published recently inthe journal Northwestern Naturalist documentshares in Yukon's boreal forest scavenging on grouse, loon, other hares and even lynx.

"It's weird seeing a bunny just kind of getting its head right into the side carcass of another rabbit and consuming meat," said Michael Peers, who wrote the paper. "It's kind of, I guess, not what you'd expect."

Peers,a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, is studying how changes in the environment may affectsnowshoe hare survival. He discovered the carnivorous haresafter setting up wildlife cameras on animal carcasses as a side project to his main research.

While it's already known in the scientific community that some herbivores occasionally indulge in meat-eating, what surprised Peerswas that the hares scavenged"quite frequently and for longperiods of time."

Hares scavenged 20 of the 161 carcasses the researchers deployed for the study and some of the hares appeared to defend carcassesfrom other hares.

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There were two other discoveries that shocked Peers. He captured two different hares eating grouse feathersover a several-day period. He thinks his photos are the first documented occurrence of this behaviour.

Peers said it was also surprising to see haresmunching on lynx, their main predator.

He said his findings addto a growing body of evidence that animals aren't as easily classified as herbivores or carnivores as once thought.

"Animals that we think are herbivores actually consume a little bit more meat than we would have otherwise suspected."

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RudyBoonstra, Peers's co-supervisor, says thediscovery is both "remarkable and puzzling" for the photographic evidence he was able to capture of the hare's diverse appetite.

But the University of Toronto professor, who hasbeen studying snowshoe hare and other mammals in Yukon and the Arctic for more than 30 years, says a lot of herbivores aren't strictly vegetarian.

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Boonstrasays he's seenArctic ground squirrels go on a "hunt and kill mission" for lemmings and then dining heartily on their brains(he published a paper on this in the Canadian Journal of Zoology in 1990).

"The animals know what they're doing," he said, adding that they are most likelysupplementing their diet.

Peers found that hares primarilyscavengein the winter. His theory is hares are looking for more protein to add to their seasonal diet of willow and dwarf birch.He suspects the feather-eating also hadsomething to do with protein, but he said it leaves questions about how a hare can digest the feathers.

Spying on the forest

Peers saysmotion-sensing trail cameras allow researchers to "spy on the forest" in ways previously unheard of.

Researchers in the past wouldlook at animal tracks in the snow around carcasses and take their best guess as to what happened there.

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Now, they can get photographic evidence with cameras that detect motion and use infrared technology to take photos at night in pitch black conditions.

Peers's natural history paper is more observational than scientific, but he hopes it might give other researchers food for thought for future studies.