Who has been here? Piece together the following clues to solve the mystery!
These brown, pea-size fibrous pellets are the second round of scat for this animal. Food is partially digested, and first pooped out as soft, jelly-like pellets that are promptly eaten to digest the full protein, fiber, and vitamins. This animal drops their pellets one at a time, so a pile indicates they have been staying in one spot for a long time.
This animal’s sharp incisor teeth cleanly nip twigs, leaving a clean, angled cut.
Their urine is orange, red, or pink depending on the chemical compounds in the plants they eat.
They push off with their strong back legs and their huge hind feet (about two and a half times the size of the front feet) usually land paired in front of the smaller staggered front feet. As Robert Macfarlane writes in The Old Ways, “…[the tracks] resemble a Halloween ghost mask, or the face of Edvard Munch’s screamer: the two rear feet are placed laterally to make elongated eyes, and between and behind them fall the forefeet in a slightly offset paired line forming nose and oval mouth. Thousands of these faces peered at me from the snow.” The distance between tracks can be over 13 feet!
Their hairy feet don’t have exposed toe pads and usually leave muffled tracks. If you do get a clear impression, you can pick out four toe impressions, even though they have five toes on each foot. The animal can stretch their toes out to expand their “snowshoes” in soft snow.
All these clues lead to…
snowshoe hare!
