Canada · mammal identification

Small Game and Furbearer Identification

By Hunters Guide. Checked against Hinterland Who's Who species accounts on September 22, 2026.

Sort small game and furbearers by body shape first, then tail, then ears and feet, because those read at distance and in bad light. Colour? Everyone reaches for it first, and it fails more often than any other cue.

A clean look at a small animal is rare. What you usually get is a shape crossing a cutline, or a head above the grass, or a wake on the water. Memorise the cues that hold up in a two second glance.

Snowshoe hare or cottontail rabbit

A snowshoe hare is a northern hare with enormous hind feet and a coat that turns white in winter. A cottontail is a smaller brown rabbit that stays brown and shows a white powder puff under its tail, and the European hare is bigger than both and also stays brown.

Start with the feet. That's where the animal got its name, and Hinterland Who's Who describes how it "travels on large, generously furred hind feet, which allow it to move easily over the snow". Next come the ears, which are short for a hare; the same source notes its "ears are smaller than most hares'". A European hare is the opposite: long-eared and rangy.

After that, check the coat calendar. The snowshoe goes "from grey-brown in summer, the fur becomes almost pure white in midwinter", with patchy stages in spring and fall. Neither of the other two changes like that.

There's also a wording problem. People call anything with long ears a rabbit, and that's harmless right up until an exam question. Hares are born furred, eyes open, while young rabbits "are born naked and blind". Rabbits dive underground, and "hares rarely go underground". So if a long-eared animal runs a wide circle instead of vanishing into a hole, it's a hare.

Red squirrel or grey squirrel

A red squirrel is a small rusty tree squirrel of conifer and mixed forest, and a grey squirrel is a noticeably larger squirrel of hardwood bush and city parks that occurs in both grey and jet black. Expect a grey to carry roughly double the bulk of a red.

Look for rusty-red on the back of a red squirrel, with a white belly and a white eye ring, plus ear tufts in winter. It's also the loud one. Anything scolding you from a spruce over a pile of shredded cone scales is a red. Greys are plainer, with a big plume of a tail. Their black phase is common enough that people take black squirrels for a separate species. They aren't.

Coyote, wolf or fox

A coyote is a medium wild canid with a narrow pointed muzzle and large erect ears. A wolf is a much heavier canid with a deep blocky muzzle and comparatively small rounded ears, and a red fox is far smaller than either. Proportion tells you which one you're looking at; colour won't.

Hinterland Who's Who puts the coyote at "9 to 23 kg" and "58 to 66 cm high at the shoulder", and calls it "Slimmer and smaller than the wolf". The same account gives two structural cues. The ears are "wide, pointed, and erect", and "the top of the muzzle on coyotes forms an almost continuous line with the forehead". It's why a coyote's head reads as a wedge. A wolf's reads as a brick.

Now work down the body. Wolves stand on long legs with oversized feet, the tail hanging down or trailing level. A coyote is finer boned and runs with its tail low, almost tucked. The red fox is another order of animal altogether: four to seven kilograms, black stockings, and a white-tipped tail so large it looks borrowed.

That leads to the classic mix-up, a young wolf against an adult coyote. By late autumn a wolf pup weighs about as much as a grown coyote, so weight is no help. Proportions don't change with age, though.

Even as a pup, a wolf has short rounded ears, a wide skull, a blunt muzzle and big paws. A coyote never grows into any of them. Our animal identification practice questions drill this pair in the same order.

Beaver or muskrat in the water

A beaver is a large aquatic rodent with a broad flat paddle tail, and a muskrat is a much smaller aquatic rodent with a thin tail flattened from side to side. Both build lodges, and both swim with little more than the head showing. The tail is what separates them.

Size isn't close, either. An adult beaver is the largest rodent in North America and runs into the tens of kilograms. Its tail is leathery and scaled, around 30 cm long and up to 18 cm wide. A muskrat? About a kilogram on average, with a tail barely wider than a pencil. On the water a beaver pushes a heavy V and keeps its tail hidden until it slaps. A muskrat leaves a small wake, tail sculling along behind.

Marten, fisher, mink and weasel, by size

Marten, fisher, mink and weasel are one family, and they form a clean size sequence. The weasel is smallest. Mink comes next, then marten, and then the fisher at several times the weasel's bulk. They all share the same long body, short legs and bounding gait, so learn them as a ladder rather than as four separate animals.

Marten and mink trip people up because their sizes overlap. Habitat splits them. Mink hunt shorelines, while marten work conifer timber. Check the throat, too: a marten shows that pale bib, a mink only a small white chin patch.

Raccoon or skunk in poor light

A raccoon is a stocky, hunch-shouldered climber with a black face mask and a ringed tail, and a striped skunk is a low, broad-bodied animal with white stripes on black. Gait gives them away before colour does. A raccoon shuffles along with its back arched, and it goes up a tree the moment it's pressed. Skunks stay on the ground. They don't climb.

Why do porcupines and groundhogs get misidentified so often?

A porcupine is a large, slow, quill-covered rodent that feeds up in trees, and a groundhog is a chunky burrowing rodent of field edges and road banks. Few animals on this page get shot in error as often. With both, the problem is the silhouette.

Hinterland Who's Who calls the porcupine "Canada's second largest rodent, next to the beaver", and notes that "The shoulders are humped, making the back look arched". Up a tree, that outline is the trap. The same account says a porcupine there "could be mistaken for the nest of a squirrel or a crow". And people do shoot at dark blobs in trees. On the ground there's no mistaking it. Quills, a waddle, and no hurry at all.

Groundhogs go the other way. At two hundred metres one is just a brown lump on a field edge, and people who fire first have called brown lumps at that range foxes, hares, cats and coyotes. Watch it instead. It sits bolt upright at a burrow mouth and drops into the ground when alarmed. Nothing else here does that.

The identification cues to stop trusting

An unreliable cue is one that changes with the season, the light or the individual animal, and three of them account for most misidentification in the field.

First up is coat colour on coyotes and foxes. Hinterland Who's Who says of the coyote that "Because it is light-coloured in winter and dark in summer, it blends well with the seasonal surroundings". So that's one animal wearing two colours in a year. Red foxes come in red, cross, silver and black phases, and every one of them is the same species.

Second is size judged without a reference. Distance compresses things and snow flattens them. A lone animal on open ground has nothing to scale against, and that's exactly how a coyote gets called a wolf. Head and ear proportions hold at any range, so read those instead.

The third is tracks in soft snow. In powder a print slumps outward as the foot lifts. In wet snow it grows as it melts, until by afternoon a coyote track measures wolf sized. Tracks tell you what lives there, but they won't identify the animal in front of you.

Birds call for the same discipline. It's why our upland bird identification guide leads with habitat and flush behaviour rather than plumage.

Does naming the species correctly carry legal weight?

Species identification carries legal weight, because rules are written species by species rather than for small game or furbearers as a block. So naming the animal belongs to the shot itself. It isn't paperwork to sort out later.

None of those rules are listed here, on purpose. They differ by province and by area, and they change. Read the current regulations published for your own jurisdiction and work from that copy. The part worth building before the season is your eye.

Questions about identifying small game and furbearers

Is a snowshoe hare a rabbit?

It is a hare. In conversation the two words get swapped freely, but hares and rabbits are different animals. A hare is born furred with its eyes open and runs from danger above ground, while rabbits are born naked and blind and bolt for a burrow. On top of that, the snowshoe hare has oversized hind feet and turns white in winter.

What is the quickest way to separate a coyote from a wolf?

Look at proportions, not size. On a coyote the muzzle is narrow and pointed, and the tall pointed ears look large for its head. A wolf has a deep blocky muzzle with shorter rounded ears that look small for its head, plus longer legs and much larger feet. When a coyote runs, its tail is usually held low.

How do you tell a beaver from a muskrat swimming?

Watch the tail. A beaver carries a broad, flat paddle. A muskrat has a thin tail flattened side to side, and you can often see it sculling on the surface behind the animal. Size backs that up. An adult beaver is a heavy animal, and a muskrat weighs about as much as a bag of sugar.

Which is bigger, a marten or a fisher?

The fisher, and it is not close. As a size sequence the family runs weasel, mink, marten, fisher, smallest to largest. Martens are roughly cat-sized and often show a pale orange or buff throat patch. A fisher is far longer and heavier than that, uniformly dark, with a long tapering tail.

Why is coat colour a poor way to name a wild canid?

Colour changes from one animal to the next, from region to region and with the season. Coyotes run lighter in winter and darker in summer. Red foxes show up in red, cross, silver and black phases, all one species. Read shape, proportion and movement instead, and leave colour for last.