Snowshoe RabbitMichigan's Color-Changing Hare of the Northern Forests

Is It a Rabbit or a Hare?

First things first: the "snowshoe rabbit" is actually a hare. Its scientific name is Lepus americanus, and despite the common name, it's biologically distinct from the rabbits most people know.

The difference matters. Hares are born fully furred with their eyes open and can hop within hours. Rabbits are born blind, naked, and helpless. Hares live above ground in dense cover. Rabbits burrow. Hares are generally larger with longer ears and more powerful hind legs.

But "snowshoe rabbit" is what most people search for, what most hunters call it, and what most guidebooks still use. So that's what we'll call it here — just know that scientifically, you're looking at a hare. (And if you're wondering how rabbits and hares fit into the bigger picture, neither one is actually a rodent — that's a separate common misconception.)

The Color Change: Brown to White and Back

Twice a year, the snowshoe rabbit rebuilds itself.

In late fall, usually October into November, its brown summer coat molts away and is replaced by pure white winter fur. Only the tips of its ears stay dark. The change takes about ten weeks, and it's triggered not by temperature but by day length — the shortening days of autumn tell the animal's body to shift.

In spring, the process reverses. The white coat falls out in patches and brown summer fur grows back in. During the transition, a snowshoe hare can look like a mottled, half-finished painting — white and brown at the same time, waiting for the seasons to finish catching up.

This is one of the most dramatic seasonal adaptations in North American wildlife. Only a handful of other animals — the Arctic fox, the ptarmigan, the long-tailed weasel — pull off anything similar. And none of them depend on it quite the way the snowshoe rabbit does.

Where Snowshoe Rabbits Live (Including Michigan)

Snowshoe rabbits are animals of the northern forest. They need two things above all else: dense cover and deep snow. Both are disappearing faster than the hare can adapt.

Their range stretches across Canada and into the northern United States — Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains south into Colorado, the Great Lakes region, and northern New England. In the Lower 48, they live where the snow still falls reliably for months at a time.

The habitat a snowshoe rabbit wants is not a mature, open forest. It's the messy, tangled, regenerating kind — young pines and spruce crowding together, alders along swamp edges, brush piles, blown-down timber, and cedar swamps where the lower branches form a dense protective ceiling. Foresters call it "rabbit thicket." Landowners usually call it an overgrown mess. The hare calls it home.

Those Famous Feet

The "snowshoe" in the name isn't decorative. The hind feet of Lepus americanus are genuinely, mechanically, snowshoes.

An adult snowshoe rabbit's hind foot can measure five inches long — enormous for an animal that weighs only three to four pounds. The toes spread wide when it hops, and dense fur grows between and around them, creating a broad platform that distributes the hare's weight across the snow's surface.

The result: a snowshoe hare can race at full speed across powder that a fox or lynx sinks chest-deep into. This is its single greatest survival advantage. In winter, the hare turns its environment against its predators — running effortlessly across the same terrain that bogs down everything trying to catch it.

What Snowshoe Rabbits Eat

Snowshoe rabbits are strict herbivores, but what they eat changes dramatically with the seasons.

Summer Diet

Through the green months, snowshoe hares browse on soft, leafy vegetation: grasses, clover, ferns, wildflowers, fresh leaves from shrubs and young trees, dandelion, strawberry plants, horsetail, and fireweed. They'll eat almost any tender green growth they can reach.

Winter Diet

When snow covers everything edible, the menu shifts to bark, buds, and twigs. Winter favorites include aspen, birch, willow, alder, and young conifer shoots. Deep snow actually helps them reach food that would otherwise be out of range — a hare standing on three feet of packed snow can browse branches a deer has to stretch for.

Like other members of the rabbit family, snowshoe hares also practice coprophagy — they re-ingest their own soft fecal pellets to extract nutrients their first pass through the digestive system missed. It sounds unpleasant but it's essential. A lot of the vitamins they need only become available the second time through.

Snowshoe Rabbit Tracks and Signs

You'll almost always know a snowshoe hare has been through an area before you ever see one. They're secretive animals, most active at dawn and dusk, and they freeze when threatened rather than bolting. But they leave obvious signs.

Their tracks are the classic hare pattern: two small front prints landing side-by-side, followed by two large hind prints that land ahead of the front prints. The hind prints show that enormous foot clearly — often five inches or longer, much larger than a cottontail's. In deep snow, you'll see the track pattern as a rhythmic series of four-print clusters separated by gaps of three to ten feet depending on how fast the hare was moving.

Other signs to look for:

• Browse lines on young aspens, willows, and conifers — clean angled cuts at rabbit-reach height, as if someone pruned the branches with sharp shears
• Pellets — round, pea-sized, often in concentrated piles at resting spots
• Forms — shallow depressions in snow or leaves where a hare hunkered down to rest, usually tucked against a log or under a low-hanging bough
• Runways — well-worn trails through dense cover, packed down by repeated use

Predators and the 10-Year Cycle

Almost everything that hunts in a northern forest eats snowshoe hares. Lynx, bobcat, coyote, fox, fisher, marten, great horned owl, goshawk, and weasel all rely on them to some degree. In many ecosystems, the snowshoe rabbit is the single most important prey species in the food web.

This has produced one of the most famous patterns in ecology: the 10-year cycle.

Snowshoe hare populations rise and crash on a roughly decade-long rhythm. During boom years, hare numbers can reach 3,000 per square mile. During the crash, that same area might hold fewer than 100. And the lynx — whose diet is so hare-dependent it's almost a dietary specialist — crashes right along with them, following the hare cycle by about a year.

Scientists have debated what drives the cycle for nearly a century. The current understanding is that it's not one cause but a feedback loop: hare populations explode, food gets stripped, predators arrive in force, stress hormones in pregnant does reduce litter sizes, and the whole system collapses simultaneously. Then slowly, over several years, the hares recover — and the cycle starts again.

Reproduction and Baby Snowshoe Hares

Snowshoe rabbits are prolific breeders, which is how they survive being eaten by nearly everything. A female (called a jill or doe) can produce two to four litters per year, with two to eight young per litter.

Unlike cottontail rabbits, baby snowshoe hares (called leverets) are born precocial — fully furred, eyes open, and able to hop within hours of birth. The mother nurses them just once a day, usually at dusk, and leaves them hidden separately in thick cover between feedings. If you find what looks like an abandoned baby hare alone in the brush, it almost certainly isn't. Its mother is nearby and will return.

This is a major behavioral split from their cottontail cousins. Cottontails build actual nests and burrow-like depressions to hide their helpless young. Snowshoe hares don't burrow at all — their defense is camouflage, speed, and dense cover, not underground shelter.

By three to four weeks old, leverets are eating vegetation and essentially on their own. They reach sexual maturity the following spring.

The Climate Change Crisis Nobody's Talking About

This is happening across the snowshoe hare's entire southern range. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New England, and the southern edge of their Michigan range, populations are declining fast. The hare's evolutionary clock — set over thousands of years of predictable northern winters — is now running out of sync with a climate it wasn't designed for.

Some populations may adapt. Research suggests there's genetic variation for different molt timing, and natural selection could favor hares that change color later or not at all. But evolution is slow and climate change is fast. For now, the snowshoe rabbit is one of the most visible casualties of a shifting North American winter.

Snowshoe Hare vs Cottontail Rabbit

The two are easy to confuse if you only glimpse them briefly. Here's how to tell them apart:

If you see a rabbit in your backyard in southern Michigan or in open farmland anywhere in the state, it's almost certainly a cottontail. If you see a large, long-footed rabbit in a cedar swamp up north — especially a white one in winter — you're looking at a snowshoe hare.

For more on their more common cousins, see our complete guide on baby rabbits and cottontails.

Can You Support Them on Your Property?

If you own land in the snowshoe rabbit's range — the Upper Peninsula, the northern Lower Peninsula, or similar zones across the Great Lakes and Northeast — you can genuinely help.

The single most important thing: preserve or create dense, young cover. Snowshoe hares need the messy middle stage of forest regeneration. If your land is all mature timber with an open understory, it's not snowshoe habitat. But a corner of regenerating aspen, a cedar swamp, a brushy edge, an alder thicket along a wet area — those are exactly what they need.

Practical steps:

• Leave brush piles instead of burning them. Stack slash from tree work into cover piles that hares use for shelter from predators.
• Protect cedar swamps and alder thickets. These low-value-looking habitats are exactly what snowshoe hares depend on. Don't "clean them up."
• Create young-forest patches. Small clearcuts, strip cuts, or areas where you let storm-damaged timber regenerate naturally produce the dense sapling stage hares need.
• Plant native conifers — white spruce, balsam fir, cedar, hemlock — on appropriate sites. These provide winter cover that hardwoods can't.
• Go easy on pesticides and invasive-removal practices that strip all understory cover. Hares need thickets, not lawns.

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