Magical creatures

AN APP R ECIATI ON OF THE HARE

Lewis Carroll created the defining image of the mad March hare, as ridiculous and minatory, in the tea-party scene in Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland. The ‘mad March hare will be much the most interesting,’ decides Alice.

I’d had a gutful of chemical farming. So, I made a plan; why don’t I take a modern, conventionally farmed arable field, plough it, and make it into a traditional wheatfield? Bring back the flowers that have all but disappeared from British ploughlands. And the birds and animals that loved such land. And hares. Could I entice in a hare? As it turned out, I could – and did.

The hour after dawn is nature’s happy hour. And then as the sun comes over the hedge it brings a hare alive. She is just in front of me. She sits up, twists her head; her bulging eyes glow with the sun’s fire. She washes her face in a flurry of paws. It is cold, and her breath steams. She has barely finished her ablutions when another bounds towards the female (a jill), and leaps at her. For centuries it was thought hares in boxing matches were males strutting their stuff for admiring females. Rather, the match is between an unreceptive female and an ardent male, a jack. She stands, and they fight, up on their hind legs, miniature humans. She fights him off and sprints away, a cacophony of limbs.

During the spraying 60s, hare numbers crashed by a million or more. There are perhaps 730,000 brown hares left in the UK. Like many other fauna in these isles, the hare is running for its life. Ungainly unless running, it moves in the way that greyhounds and racehorses are graceful; a hare ripples through the wheat. They have large hearts to enable them to achieve a speed of 40mph. It’s name is lepus from the Latin levipes, light foot.

And My God, hares are large: this tawny, magnificent creature must be two feet long; almost half the size again of its drab rabbit cousin. They have the chiselled head of horses, the legs of lurchers – and the eyes of lions; the ancient Chinese considered the animal so otherworldly they decided its ancestor lived in the moon.

One day, a jack hare runs, with rocking-chair gait, down the lane towards me. He stops, and glares with golden eyes. For a minute, maybe, the hare and I see eye to eye; now up on hind legs, cock-eared, he continues to look, unblinking. The Middle English poem ‘The Names of the Hare’ gives 77 synonyms for hare; they include ‘starer’.

Putting hares back into the countryside is more than ‘re-naturing’. Hares are a defining English animal. When Vita Sackville-West wished to invoke the unchanging pastoralism of England in The Edwardians, what natural items did she list? ‘The verdure of the trees, the hares and the deer’. Have hares, have our national landscape.

John Lewis-Stempel is author of The Running Hare: the Secret Life of Farmland (Black Swan).