Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2014 11:44:34 GMT -5
By Bob Frye
Published: Saturday, March 1, 2014, 10:21 p.m.
There's looking and then there's finding. Emily Boyd has been doing a lot of the former and not so much of the latter.
That's the price of discovery.
Boyd has spent most of the winter tromping through the Laurel Highlands, poking around mountain laurel thickets, young patches of forest and other dense, ridgetop spots — often wearing snowshoes — looking for snowshoe hares. She's yet to actually lay eyes on one.
“I have been able to find at least two sets of tracks, though, which is pretty exciting,” said Boyd, a biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
That anyone is even looking for hares is unusual.
A relative of the cottontail — though taxonomically not a true rabbit — hares are native to Pennsylvania. There's always been an interest in them, too. The commission stocked 33,000 hares from New Brunswick around the state in the early part of the 20th century, and Dark Shade Beagle Club released hundreds more into the Laurel Highlands as recently as the early part of this century.
No one's every really tried to determine what “normal” for hares in Pennsylvania should be in terms of population and range.
That's changing.
Boyd is looking for hares locally with a goal of figuring out where they might be, in what abundance and whether the Laurel Highlands is a travel corridor for hares to move between Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
At the same time, Laura Gigliotti, a graduate research assistant with the Pennsylvania Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit, is trapping hares in Warren and Monroe counties. She's outfitting them with radio and/or GPS collars to monitor their movements, habitat use and survival.
Her goal is to collar 15 in each county. She had 13 in Monroe as of early last week and eight in Warren.
“Populations don't seem to be as big as everyone at first thought, at least in the western part of the state, so I don't know if we're going to get to our goal,” Gigliotti said.
Therein lies the reason for these studies.
Pennsylvania long has allowed hare hunting. It's always served as the one means for monitoring population trends. But harvests have been declining. Whereas hare hunters took 3,615 in 1990, they took just 690 in 2012.
That's partly a result of declining effort. The number of hare hunters dropped from nearly 8,000 to about 2,200 over that same time, according to commission statistics.
But there's a fear hare populations are shrinking, too.
“This is a species of special concern, so I want to see us be conservative until we get a better handle for what's going on,” said commissioner Jay Delaney of Luzerne County at a recent board meeting.
The hares' woes as a species likely are tied to habitat, said Chris Ryan, supervisor of game management services for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, which has a hare study on its own agenda. They do best in regenerating timber cuts, where the woods are between 5 and 15 years old, he said.
“One hundred years ago, there was a tremendous amount of that kind of forest, both in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. That's not the case now,” Ryan said.
The hares Gigliotti has found in Monroe County have been turning up in wetland areas with thick conifers and scrub oak, with lots of underbrush and overhead cover. In Warren County, they've been in hardwood stands harvested within the past decade, she said.
Those latter ones seem more prone to roam than others.
“We check them one day, and the next they might have moved, I don't know, maybe a mile. Other ones don't seem to move much at all,” she said.
Why that is, like so much else with Pennsylvania's hares, is a mystery, she said.
Perhaps these studies — each of which will run for three years — will provide answers, said Matt Lovallo, head of the agency's game mammals section.
“We will be learning a lot of stuff for the first time,” Lovallo said. “You don't really expect to get to study something wildlife-related in Pennsylvania that's not already been studied extensively before. So this is kind of neat,” Boyd said. “There's a lot of information to be learned about hares here, for sure.
A question of color
Pennsylvania's snowshoe hare work already is proving interesting in one sense.
Hares, like some other species, change color to match the seasons. Triggered by the changing hours of daylight, they go from brown in summer to white in winter and back again. That's meant to provide camouflage and increase survival.
At least that's how things usually have worked.
Scott Mills, a researcher at North Carolina University, has spent the past 15 years or so studying hares in Montana. He's noticed that — as winters become milder and snow less common or long-lasting — some hares aren't changing to become completely white as they once did.
“Overall, in science, I think we would say that evolution can happen faster than we thought before. We've really solidified that meaningful change in body shape, form and behavior can occur over tens of years rather than thousands of years,” he said.
He'll be studying the idea more in West Virginia starting this summer, when he starts trapping and collaring hares to monitor when and how completely they change color.
Laura Gigliotti already has found some mixed brown and white hares in Pennsylvania. Two of the hares captured in Monroe County had white ears, noses and stomachs but were otherwise brown, she said.
Read more: triblive.com/sports/outdoors/5655516-74/hares-pennsylvania-boyd#ixzz2v0sMJg9f
Follow us: @triblive on Twitter | triblive on Facebook
Published: Saturday, March 1, 2014, 10:21 p.m.
There's looking and then there's finding. Emily Boyd has been doing a lot of the former and not so much of the latter.
That's the price of discovery.
Boyd has spent most of the winter tromping through the Laurel Highlands, poking around mountain laurel thickets, young patches of forest and other dense, ridgetop spots — often wearing snowshoes — looking for snowshoe hares. She's yet to actually lay eyes on one.
“I have been able to find at least two sets of tracks, though, which is pretty exciting,” said Boyd, a biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
That anyone is even looking for hares is unusual.
A relative of the cottontail — though taxonomically not a true rabbit — hares are native to Pennsylvania. There's always been an interest in them, too. The commission stocked 33,000 hares from New Brunswick around the state in the early part of the 20th century, and Dark Shade Beagle Club released hundreds more into the Laurel Highlands as recently as the early part of this century.
No one's every really tried to determine what “normal” for hares in Pennsylvania should be in terms of population and range.
That's changing.
Boyd is looking for hares locally with a goal of figuring out where they might be, in what abundance and whether the Laurel Highlands is a travel corridor for hares to move between Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
At the same time, Laura Gigliotti, a graduate research assistant with the Pennsylvania Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit, is trapping hares in Warren and Monroe counties. She's outfitting them with radio and/or GPS collars to monitor their movements, habitat use and survival.
Her goal is to collar 15 in each county. She had 13 in Monroe as of early last week and eight in Warren.
“Populations don't seem to be as big as everyone at first thought, at least in the western part of the state, so I don't know if we're going to get to our goal,” Gigliotti said.
Therein lies the reason for these studies.
Pennsylvania long has allowed hare hunting. It's always served as the one means for monitoring population trends. But harvests have been declining. Whereas hare hunters took 3,615 in 1990, they took just 690 in 2012.
That's partly a result of declining effort. The number of hare hunters dropped from nearly 8,000 to about 2,200 over that same time, according to commission statistics.
But there's a fear hare populations are shrinking, too.
“This is a species of special concern, so I want to see us be conservative until we get a better handle for what's going on,” said commissioner Jay Delaney of Luzerne County at a recent board meeting.
The hares' woes as a species likely are tied to habitat, said Chris Ryan, supervisor of game management services for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, which has a hare study on its own agenda. They do best in regenerating timber cuts, where the woods are between 5 and 15 years old, he said.
“One hundred years ago, there was a tremendous amount of that kind of forest, both in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. That's not the case now,” Ryan said.
The hares Gigliotti has found in Monroe County have been turning up in wetland areas with thick conifers and scrub oak, with lots of underbrush and overhead cover. In Warren County, they've been in hardwood stands harvested within the past decade, she said.
Those latter ones seem more prone to roam than others.
“We check them one day, and the next they might have moved, I don't know, maybe a mile. Other ones don't seem to move much at all,” she said.
Why that is, like so much else with Pennsylvania's hares, is a mystery, she said.
Perhaps these studies — each of which will run for three years — will provide answers, said Matt Lovallo, head of the agency's game mammals section.
“We will be learning a lot of stuff for the first time,” Lovallo said. “You don't really expect to get to study something wildlife-related in Pennsylvania that's not already been studied extensively before. So this is kind of neat,” Boyd said. “There's a lot of information to be learned about hares here, for sure.
A question of color
Pennsylvania's snowshoe hare work already is proving interesting in one sense.
Hares, like some other species, change color to match the seasons. Triggered by the changing hours of daylight, they go from brown in summer to white in winter and back again. That's meant to provide camouflage and increase survival.
At least that's how things usually have worked.
Scott Mills, a researcher at North Carolina University, has spent the past 15 years or so studying hares in Montana. He's noticed that — as winters become milder and snow less common or long-lasting — some hares aren't changing to become completely white as they once did.
“Overall, in science, I think we would say that evolution can happen faster than we thought before. We've really solidified that meaningful change in body shape, form and behavior can occur over tens of years rather than thousands of years,” he said.
He'll be studying the idea more in West Virginia starting this summer, when he starts trapping and collaring hares to monitor when and how completely they change color.
Laura Gigliotti already has found some mixed brown and white hares in Pennsylvania. Two of the hares captured in Monroe County had white ears, noses and stomachs but were otherwise brown, she said.
Read more: triblive.com/sports/outdoors/5655516-74/hares-pennsylvania-boyd#ixzz2v0sMJg9f
Follow us: @triblive on Twitter | triblive on Facebook
