Kamchatka in the time of coronovirus - Northern hares!

31 March 2020

Mountain hare, Lepidus timidus (Wikimedia Commons)

Moscow is "shut down," but Kamchatka has yet to document a case of coronavirus; it has come as close as Sakhalin now, and Tanya says that a petition by Kamchatka residents is circulating, asking that Kamchatka be closed off to outsiders (for how long?). We are essentially on an island.  Could we ride this out "clean"? And/or is the virus already here?

Coronavirus in Russia 30 March 2020, Moscow Times

The entire country is on "paid holiday" this week.  Of course, health workers, grocery store and apteka (pharmacy) personnel are working.  As is a guard at the sports stadium, where we commonly start our ski excursions.  We were yelled at for trying to go under the gate, and the next day they had added webbing to prevent such nefarious activity.

With warm (above freezing) weather, fresh snow, some sun, and "nelzia rabotat" (it is forbidden to work), there are more folks at the cross country ski area.  So for the last two days, we went into the forest, doing traditional cross country rather than skate skiing on groomed trails.

Jody and Tanya's wild Kamchatka, part 1 -- northern hares
Quickly Tanya and I found ourselves "working" as naturalists.  Fresh snow, many tracks.  Many many tracks of the mountain hare, Lepidus timidus, a close relative of the Arctic hare.  I can't tell the difference from pictures, but the mountain hare is Eurasian, the Arctic hare from North America and Greenland.  Maybe they diverged when the Bering land bridge was flooded some 10,000 years ago. In Russian, the northern hare is the "mountain hare"
горный заяц (gornyy zayats)

The tracks of northern hares, x-country skis for scale, photo T. Pinegina

Telltale "rabbit" (northern hare) pellets. [Tanya photo]

It may be the Year of the Rat in the Chinese calendar, but it appears to be the Year of the Northern Hare on Kamchatka. Before our recent spate of snowstorms, there were spots that were completely trampled by the hares, who left the signature calling card of all rabbity animals.  This picture was taken along a snowmobile trail, where it appeared that someone had cut down a number of willow shrubs, and not ones that were in the way, so - to attract the hares? Was someone trapping them? We saw no evidence of hunting, but lots of evidence that the hares were eating and pooping regularly. Willow is a large part of their regular diet, according to Wikipedia northern hare. Our evidence supports that.

After a few weeks of snow drought, we have had several snowstorms.  As we skied along snowmobile (snegahod, снегоход) trails (which helped compact the new, deep, soft snow), we would notice holes dug next to the trail.  The holes were always near willow shrubs sticking out of the snow. We speculated/hypothesized that the holes were dug by northern hares, seeking out tasty willow shoots or other herbaceous materials. Why next to the snegahod trail?  Like us, the animals were using the compacted track to make it easier to get around.  Really!

The hares use the snowmobile trail to get along. One of them ventured off the track here, but then returned (above, left).  The other track is from a small mammal, we debated fox or otherwise.  Photo:  Tanya Pinegina

Along one trail, we found an ENORMOUS hole!  Tanya said it could even trap a human, which brought to my mind the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python.  Try explaining that to Tanya -- good luck with that.

The "killer rabbit" hole, with human for scale (Tanya photo)

Upon reflection, given our experience the next day (today), this might have been more than just an attempt to reach willow shoots, it might have been one of their burrows (if only temporary).  Because TODAY Tanya spotted a hare jumping from a burrow and running, at which point I also spotted it, running really really fast!  No photo of the hare, but we followed its tracks back to the burrow, where the tracks ended/started.

The burrow from which a northern hare emerged

In terms of life of the northern hare, I/we have two more sets of photos to share.  Yesterday we saw a lot of evidence that the hares were chewing away on the willow branches.

Well-gnawed willow branches, with some footprints of the perpetrator, the northern hare. We concluded that some gnawing had to have been done before the most recent snowfall because there are no tracks near some of the marks.  Some of the gnawed was quite high - these guys can really stretch out on their hind legs!

The other pictures are ones that Andre Kozhurin took back in 2017 when we went on a three-day ski trek toward Nalichevo National Park.  He and Tanya saw three hares, Sasha Lander and I only saw lots of big tracks.  Here are a couple of Andre's photos. The hares are hard to see -- in both cases near the center of the picture.

Northern hares on Kamchatka, winter 2017, photos by Andre Kozhurin.  Look near the center of each photo.

You can go to the web, of course, and see lots of pictures of northern hares and their close relative, the Arctic hare.  The best videos I found are about Arctic hares, with great video of them running, just amazing.

Well, there is another chapter to this story, we'll save that for Jody and Tanya's wild Kamchatka, part 2 -- the predators.

BUT if you want to see one of the most amazing videos of a northern hare escaping an avalanche, check this out!