2001/01/01 by Charles J. Krebs, Rudy Boonstra, Stan Boutin +1 · 2 citations
Environmental Science · #Wildlife Ecology and Conservation #Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies #Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies #Snowshoe hare #Environmental science #Biology #Ecology #Predation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0025:wdtyco]2.0.co;2
openalex publication_date 2001/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In 1831 the manager of a Hudson's Bay Company post in northern Ontario wrote to the head office in London. The local Ojibway Indians were starving, he reported, because of a scarcity of “rabbits,” and they were unable to trap for furs because they spent all their time fishing for food (Winterhalder 1980). These shortages of so-called rabbits, which apparently occurred approximately every 10 years, are regularly mentioned in Canadian historical documents from the 18th and 19th centuries. Those rabbits were in fact snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus), and their 10-year cycle is one of the most intriguing features of the ecology of the boreal forest. Ten-year cycles were first analyzed quantitatively when wildlife biologists began to plot the fur trading records of Hudson's Bay Company during the early 1900s. The Hudson's Bay Company, established in 1671, kept meticulous records of the numbers of furs traded from different posts spread across Canada. The most famous time series drawn together from those records was that of Canada lynx (Elton and Nicholson 1942; Figure 1). The lynx is a specialist predator of snowshoe hares, and the rise and fall in lynx numbers mirrors, with a slight time lag, the rise and fall of snowshoe hare populations across the boreal region.