Arctic Hare
The coat can change colours with the seasons

Order: Lagomorpha    Family: Leporidae     Genus & Species: Lepus timidus

Lives throughout the Arctic on the tundra, the forests and mountains of Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia and Canada.  Also found in Ireland, Scotland and the Alps.  It is equipped with a coat that can change colours with the seasons to provide highly effective camouflage all the year round.


Habitat
In the Canadian High Arctic, the Arctic hare thrives on islands that are little more than frozen deserts with only scattered patches of stunted vegetation.   Here the temperature may fall as low as -380C in the dark depths of winter, and the hare's limited food supply is often buried beneath wind-packed snow for 280 days of the year.
The hare can cope with these conditions because its winter coat provides excellent insulation.  In winter, the hairs are hollow and act rather like the air cavity in double-glazed windows.  The hollow hairs also appear white because they lack a solid, coloured core.  		 
Their food supply is often buried beneath the snow
In the far north of its range the hare keeps this winter coat for seven months of the year, but eventually it sheds it to reveal a thinner, summer coat of brown, solid-cored hair.
Further south, the Arctic hare lives in forests and moorlands and in some places, such as Ireland, may even range over lowland pastures.  In these milder climates, the hare keeps its summer coat all through the year.
They often live in groups
 Behaviour
The Arctic hare, like all hares, is an open country animal, well equipped for fast sprinting to escape its enemies.  This enables it to feed away from cover, unlike its relative the rabbit, which bolts down burrows at the slightest threat.  An Arctic hare under attack may dive into cover if it is available, but it usually relies on its speed and agility when fleeing from predators.
Surviving the harsh Arctic climate is another matter though. 
The Arctic hare often digs snow burrows to shelter from the freezing wind.  In some parts of Russia it tunnels into the ground,and in the mountainous regions it often resorts to rock crevices for shelter.  During storms and blizzards Arctic hares may gather and sit with their backs to the wind in the shelter of ridges.  At such times, they abandon their normal solitary habits and become quite sociable, and in the High Arctic they often live in large groups of 100 or more.

Feeding
The teeth of the Arctic hare are well adapted for nibbling tough vegetation, and grass in particular.  Grass has evolved a defensive make up of flinty granules, which act like sandpaper on the teeth of animals that eat it regularly.  However, the hare's front teeth compensate for this abrasive effect by growing continuously, so although they wear down, they never wear out.  In addition, the cheek teeth have broad, grinding surfaces for mashing the food to a pulp.  		They can make a meal of almost any vegetation
This enables the hare to make a meal of almost any vegetation, from grass, heather and bilberry shoots to the young stems of trees, such as birch and willow.  In fact, it often depends on these tree shoots for survival through the winter.
Once swallowed, the Arctic hare's food undergoes a complicated digestive process.   The hare's appendix is enlarged into a stomach-like chamber called the caecum, which contains bacteria that turn tough, difficult to digest plant cellulose into nutrients.  Some of these nutrients are absorbed immediately, but most pass out in the hare's droppings.  Instead of wasting these nutrients, the hare eats its first soft droppings so that remaining nutrients can be extracted the second time around, a process called coprophagy.

Females raise as many litters as possible
Breeding
Life is hard for the Arctic hare, so it has to make the most of every chance it gets to breed.  In the south of its range, it starts in early January, and in the High Arctic mating begins as soon as the long daylight hours return in early May.   Each male attempts to mate with as many females as possible, and tries to stop them mating with other males.  The female attempts to raise as many litters as possible, while avoiding any waste of resources. 
If the weather deteriorates and food becomes scarce, a pregnant female can re-absorb half-formed embryos and recycle them into her system.
Born in a grassy hollow or a shallow depression scraped in gravel, the young Arctic hare is already well developed, with a thick coat of fur and open eyes.  It is able to find hiding places within a day, and here it is suckled by its mother for three weeks.   Soon after weaning her young, the mother leaves to mate again and raise another litter.

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