Magical Creatures

When I think of furry little creatures I go a little bit squishy. I think of the characters that were so beautifully illustrated in the Beatrice Potter stories. Tom Kitten, Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin: Surely the most adorable and best loved creatures in children's literature.

Naturally, in real life, farmers see many of these animals as pests. As a young girl I often saw little men in black velvet - better known as moles, fastened to barbed wire fences along the edges of fields. Boys on the school bus teased us, saying that the farmer put them there so cruelly to warn other moles to move on but of course moles are blind so it was a bad joke. The true reason for impaling the dead moles was to dry them out so that the skins were easier to remove. Farmers sewed them together to make warm lining for their coats. Living in the countryside can be very upsetting.

One small furry animal that I am particularly fond of is the hare. I have only been lucky enough to encounter a hare once, driving along a country lane late at night. The hare was running directly towards me and froze my headlights beam. It was a magical moment. What a noble creature. Long, black-tipped ears, a white tail and strong back legs. Brown hares either live solitary or in pairs. They are incredibly fast, running at up to 45 miles per hour when evading predators.

The Romans are credited with introducing brown hares to Britain more than 2,000 years ago. If we are to believe the story of the Iceni queen Boudica consulting the entrails of a hare as an augury of victory in her uprising against the Romans in AD61, the animals had established themselves quickly. The brown hare is now considered naturalised. Curiously they are not found in Scotland or the Scottish Islands. 

Unfortunately for this magnificent animal, it is considered game and the hare season begins on the so-called Glorious Twelfth of August, when it is acceptable to take to the mosaic fields of Britain and shoot them. Like all game, there are many ways to cook hare - jugged is the most traditional method. Although I have eaten rabbit, I have never been tempted to eat hare. I recently switched off a cooking programme on TV because the cook was using hare in a game pie recipe. I cannot understand it at all. It should be a crime to kill a hare. 

In hare mythology, the hare is a creature with pagan, sacred and mystic associations, by turns benign, cunning, romantic or, most famously, in its March courtship rituals, mad. It is largely silent, preferring to feed at night or, in summer, as the last light fades from the day, a shadowy existence which adds to its mysteriousness. 

In Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit stories the character of Hare is superior and strutting, occasionally pernickety, always aloof – a rendering for children of the animal’s natural reserve as well his appropriateness as a denizen of that world of aristocratic entitlement evoked by Sackville-West. For example, it is Hare who keeps Grey Rabbit up to scratch in the matter of housekeeping: “Where’s the milk, Grey Rabbit?” asked Hare. “We can’t drink tea without milk.”

As with so many forms of British wildlife, today’s hares are threatened by changing agricultural practice. Larger fields with a single cereal crop a year curtail hares’ year-round food supply while offering them diminished cover, and their forms – shallow depressions in the ground – offer limited shelter and, potentially, a degree of exposure and vulnerability. A survey in 2008 estimated current brown hare numbers in Britain in the region of 800,000, a figure which represents a consistent if gradual decline since the Sixties. Unlike rabbits, hares are resistant to myxomatosis and have suffered no equivalent cull.  

As with so many forms of British wildlife, today’s hares are threatened by changing agricultural practice. Larger fields with a single cereal crop a year curtail hares’ year-round food supply while offering them diminished cover, and their forms – shallow depressions in the ground – offer limited shelter and, potentially, a degree of exposure and vulnerability. A survey in 2008 estimated current brown hare numbers in Britain in the region of 800,000, a figure which represents a consistent if gradual decline since the Sixties. Unlike rabbits, hares are resistant to myxomatosis and have suffered no equivalent cull.

During the mating season hares have boxing matches, standing on their hind legs. It is a sight that I would love to see. 

Hares At Play

The birds are gone to bed; the cows are still,
And sheep lie panting on each old mole-hill;
And underneath the willow’s gray-green bough -
Like toil a resting - lies the fallow plough.
The timid hares throw daylight's fears away
On the lane’s road, to dust and dance and play
Then dabble in the grain, by nought deterred,
To lick the dewfall from the barley’s beard,
Then out they sturt again and round the hill
Like happy thoughts - dance - squat - and loiter still
Till milking maidens in the early morn
Gingle their yokes and sturt them in the corn;
Through well known beaten paths each nimbling hare
Sturts quick as fear - and seeks its hidden lair.

John Clare

Thanks for reading. Adele