Chel Anderson is a North Shore naturalist. She lives here in
Cook County and joins us periodically to talk about phenology or
what’s going on in the woods right now. Welcome, Chel! Well, one
of the most common tracks we see in winter snow is the familiar
snowshoe hare. So, what are they doing to get ready for spring?
Anderson: They are doing what everything’s doing still, right
now, which is just trying to stay alive and that’s increasingly
hard at this time of year if you’re a browser in particular. So,
something that’s eating the woody vegetation in the case of
wintertime. Lots of things are getting buried under the snow
that otherwise would be available to you, and you’re eating
right along and snowshoe hares don’t travel huge distances in
the winter. They’re not, you know, covering huge areas, so
they’re working through their available foods, which, at this
time of year, like I said, includes, you know, woody vegetation,
but not heavy woody vegetation. They can’t be, you know, eating
great, big limbs of t