I wanted to share the report of something most people never ponder in the Snowshoe Hair or white rabbit of North America.
There is with this rabbit like the lemming a perpetual boom and bust cycle. They reproduce at an outstanding production of 3 litters per year in a year which has barely 4 months called not winter, and each litter produces 8 offspring.
They will produce to a rate of 6000 per square mile or 100 per acre or approximately a block in a city.
It is then the series of diseases come which destroy all wildlife when their numbers are in the boom cycle and an absolute obliteration occurs in around a 7 year cycle.
It does not matter if every bird, fur predator and human is killing piles of rabbits a day, the northern muskeg can out produce the slaughter, and then it is a matter of the Lynx which eats rabbits starves to death.
I have some Hudson Bay Company fur harvest numbers which are interesting in proof of this rapid rise of meat supply, and then in hare death, the lynx starve and then are killed coming to human settlements to die.
In 1900, number of skins taken 4,473 " 1901 " 5,781 " 1902 " 9,117 " 1903 " 19,267 " 1904 " 36,116 " 1905 " 58,850 " 1906 " 61,388 " 1907 " 36,201 " 1908 " 9,664
Ernest Thompson Seton. The Arctic Prairies
It is a reality of how nature not husbanded destroys itself, and if people were not around to harvest those tens of thousands of lynx, they would be just rotting on the muskeg floor too.
It is not only the hare which has had problems, but American "wildlife specialists" underharvested the Snow and Blue Goose, so instead of liberalizing shooting in the 1960's when there were hunters, the geese over produced and destroyed their habitat, to which the Americans then shot myriads of geese by the remaining rich hunters who breasted the birds and left them to rot, and the Federals did nothing to stop this wanton waste, which was all their criminal fault.
The extreme of the Snowshoe Hare is but the need for sound wildlife management with human hunters on top with sound predator trapping and snaring to benefit those numbers. The hare is only really good like mosquitoes as a food source. A working person would starve to death eating rabbit meat as it has no fat content. The pelt is something of no leather and sheds.
The Indians would weave from strips of rabbit hide a sort of Granny Stitch afghan, but the user would be covered with hair and spitting the same, even if the robe was warm in trapping air.
I have a plan from an old Fur Fish Game book for the design of one of these, it basically was a cord outer shell, placed on four poles to stretch it rectangular, and hten simply looping the cut rabbit hide strips for the first line and then looping in to the loops of the hide, in splicing the other rabbit strips in.
So many things I would rather be doing than this blog, and doing the above for a season, while snaring and trapping lynx would be and addition. I like the lynx as a predator in being about 40 pounds, and it will kill fox. They can kill animals to moose size and I think Pa Ingalls got attacked by one in the Little House books as they sound like babies crying when they scream.
Much prefer them to wolves as a wolf is such a heinous murderer in pack in enjoying it too much.
It is interesting that the Northern Great Plains of America experienced several die offs of species since the 1950's, but of them the leopard frog did recover after a 1970 die off from red leg disease, where no frogs were seen until the 1990's, and the die off the blacktail Jackrabbit which never has recovered, which is a shame in that as they were lovely creatures of brown in summer and white in winter.
They used to litter the highways, but now all one witnesses are those raccoons due to no one buying fur. In time the raccoon will succumb to some distemper or rabies outbreak and then they will be rare animals again too.
I know from discussions that the raccoon was unknown during the early part of the 20th century on the plains as much was the possum. Now those vermin are killing all sorts of things where the rabbits were just the fooder and nice to look at.
I will end this now with dreams of things like trade guns, grouse, moose meat, pike, lynx and snowshoe hares.
Oh what a life I would lead if not caught in the trap of poverty and all the other humans producing a plague to destroy all.
"For example, during a week spent at Fort Smith, Preble had out a line of 50 mouse-traps every night and caught only one Shrew and one Meadowmouse in a week. Four years before he had trapped on exactly the same ground, catching 30 or 40 Meadowmice every night. Again, in 1904 it was possible to see 100 Muskrats any fine evening. In 1907, though continually on the lookout, I saw less than a score in six months. Redsquirrels varied in the same way."
Ernest Thompson Seton. The Arctic Prairies
Perhaps the same disease structures killed the native mice, muskrats and squirrels. Things did not jump though to humans in the same guise as lab engineered AIDS and SAARS though in the modern China era of blame the duck feeding in the pig poop pen the Chin are fertilizing from.
agtG
