The case of the disappearing rabbit
Lily Huang of Newsweek reports in excellent detail on climate change and lynx. Canada lynx rely on snowshoe hares for nearly their entire diet. And the hare is being lost to climate change. As the hare goes, so goes the lynx....
Ten million acres of the American West may depend on the fate of the vanishing snowshoe hare.
In the roadless, snow-muffled backcountry of northwestern Montana lies your best chance of ever seeing a wild Canada lynx. An improbable creature, it is small on the spectrum of wildcats—about three times the size of a house cat—and stands on disproportionately long legs, on which it is uncommonly fast. Its great head seems larger and wiser for its tuft of beard and the birdish plumes at the tips of its ears, but its feet spoil its air of gravitas. They are enormous. They act like snowshoes, and they are part of what makes the lynx supremely adapted to this part of the Rocky Mountains. Another inhabitant, the snowshoe hare, is adapted to life here, too. A lynx, if it could, would eat nothing but snowshoe hares its whole life, and pretty much does.
