Maine’s 810 snowshoe hare records form a distinctly northern map. Hancock and Piscataquis counties lead, and the named places read like a tour of the north woods: Acadia National Park, Baxter State Park, the Appalachian National Scenic Trail corridor, and Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.
Built for deep snow
The snowshoe hare’s oversized hind feet spread its weight like snowshoes, letting it run across powder that would sink a pursuing predator. It lives in dense young conifer forest, alder thickets, and regenerating cuts, feeding on buds, twigs, and bark through winter and on green growth in summer. Each fall it trades a brown coat for white as daylight shortens, a change timed to snow rather than temperature. That camouflage is superb in a normal Maine winter, though a white hare on bare ground stands out badly in low-snow years.
Easiest to see in summer
Hares do not hibernate, but they move mostly at night and hold tight in thick cover, so the year’s tallies peak from June through August, when animals in brown coats show against the understory and long evenings put more watchers in the woods. In winter, broad track patterns in fresh snow are often the only sign a hare passed through.
Status in Maine
NatureServe ranks the snowshoe hare S5, Secure, in Maine, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
