Raising Hare: A Memoir

by Chloe Dalton

The trees were frosted white with windblown snowflakes, while icy cobwebs hung in the hedgerows like frozen cat’s cradles. A lone kestrel brooded on the garden fence, spectral in the dim light. Lean foxes patrolled the landscape, stalking gully and thicket, their boldness heightened by hunger.

Siberians name hares by the time of their birth: nastovik (born in March, when snow is covered with crust), letnik (born in summer), listopadnik (born in the fall, when leaves fall from trees). —A. A. Cherkassov, Notes of an East Siberian Hunter, 1865

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, wrote that “there is no comradeship except through unity on the same rope, climbing towards the same peak,” and he might as well have been describing the single-mindedness that animated me and my colleagues.

If I had an addiction, it was to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and crises, and to travel, which I often had to do at a few hours’ notice.

The sky is low, the wind forceful. Water runs underground, surfacing with spouts and gurgles into narrow streams that wind through low-hanging stands of alder, willow and birch; urgent in winter, unhurried in summer.

the most common cause of death in leverets in captivity is stress caused by noise and excessive handling.

After about eight weeks, when the leveret was weaned and adapted to solid food, I should release it back into nature. Until then, it would be essential that I keep it in surroundings that were as tranquil as possible, and only one person should touch it.

I listened to the landscape. It was quiet enough to hear the thrum of the wind over the ground, and the boom as it struck the wood. Quiet enough, during lulls in the wind, to hear the calls of individual birds.

At feeding time, I would scoop the leveret’s warm little body up out of its nest and coax the teat of the bottle into its mouth. To avoid startling it, I sang quietly the same soothing words each time I opened the door and walked towards it.

By the end of its first week, the leveret gradually started drinking more vigorously. Its tiny ivory-coloured paws would grip the bottle near my hand, or knead the air in a trembling, milky ecstasy, while its short ears vibrated behind its head and its velvety pad of a nose worked constantly, and its fan of whiskers tickled my hands and my face as I bent over it.

At first sight, its coat appeared to be deep brown in colour—the shade of wet earth—but each strand of its fur seemed to be marked in alternating shades of dark and light. This baffled me until I learnt that so-called agouti colouring—varying bands of pigmentation on an individual hair—is an essential feature of camouflage in hares and many other wild animals, evolved over thousands of years of natural selection.

Unlike a dog’s, the soles of the leveret’s paws were furry: soft and warm to the touch and always immaculate. One ancient Greek name for a hare translates as “shaggy foot,” which perfectly described the thick coat on the base of each of the leveret’s feet. Seen from behind as it moved, the leveret looked as if it were wearing a pair of pale, finely woven cashmere socks. When relaxed, its toes came together into a graceful point, but the leveret could fan them out at will in order to reach the fine fur between them with its teeth and tongue.

When I put the leveret down after feeding, it would run around the room and climb over my legs, its stomach taut and bulging. I then saw that a hare’s tail is not the round fluffy cotton ball of a rabbit, but a long stub that it can flick from side to side, fold underneath its hindquarters when it sits or extend out behind it when it lies down. Coated above in shaggy grey hair, its underside was a brilliant white.

After it had run around for a while, I would put the leveret back into its nest, where it would sit for hours without moving, with just the tip of its nose showing through the dried grass. I was amazed that tucking it into the box was all that was necessary for it to stay in position indefinitely. Even though the side was open, it never left; each time I would return and find it huddled motionless in the hay. I later understood that it was mirroring the behaviour of leverets in the wild, which do not leave their nests in daylight hours for the first weeks of their existence.

The hare is born…to be all creatures’ prey. —Pliny the Elder, Natural History, AD 77–79

The brown hare population has declined substantially in Britain and some other parts of Europe since the turn of the twentieth century, with populations concentrated in isolated patches rather than being found nearly everywhere, as used to be the case. According to conservationists, Britain has lost over 80 per cent of its hare population in a hundred years.

And o’er the plain, and o’er the mountain’s ridge, Away she flies; nor ships with wind and tide, And all their canvas wings, scud half so fast. —William Somervile, The Chase, 1735

The hares have no season of their love for, as I said, it is called ryding time, for in every month of the year that it shall not be that some be not with kindles. —Edward of Norwich, The Master of Game, 1406

The sight of boxing hares used to be thought to involve two males fighting over territory. It is now believed to usually involve a female fending off a male. There are two types of fights: “distance fights,” in which only the paws of each hare touch, and “breast fights,” in which the hares will strike at one another’s chest and face.

Courtship fights can last several days, and it is the male hare’s repeated touching of the body of the female that stimulates ovulation. The leveret’s early athleticism in the garden took on a new significance, as a form of preparation for this type of demand upon its body.

I busied myself with work and gave philosophical replies to anyone who asked about the hare, hiding my sadness at its disappearance, and feeling guilty for my absence. Two weeks later, as I looked out of an upstairs window, I noticed a movement in the long grass at the top of the garden, which had grown to knee height. By mere chance, I glimpsed the tips of the hare’s ears. For reasons unknown, it was hiding, its body completely camouflaged. As dusk deepened, I stared out into the garden, puzzled. I saw a faint stirring in the flower bed, and what I thought were three baby rabbits emerging one by one from the undergrowth.

These were three leverets. The question of the hare’s sex, and of its ability to integrate into the local population, was finally answered. I was relieved that being raised in human hands seemed not to have altered the hare’s nature, or her affinity for her own kind. I felt grateful to her for choosing to have her leverets in the garden and flattered by the decision, as if it confirmed that she saw the house as her haven.

For the next month, I watched the hare feed, protect and discipline her leverets. In the early morning light, they played in the flower bed amid the lavender and the roses, tumbling over each other and delicately nibbling at the flowers. As the sun rose, they disappeared, each to their own form in a different spot in the garden. Any time one of the three made an unauthorised foray during daylight hours, the mother hare pounced fiercely, diving at the offending leveret with outstretched paws, until it ducked back into its hiding place.

As the light began to fade, the leverets emerged from their separate hiding places, and gradually converged on a bare patch of earth surrounded by grass teeming with clover flowers, bone-grey in the near-darkness. The hare watched them for about half an hour, keeping her distance, during what must have been the period of greatest peril for her and the leverets, when they would be visible to passing predators. At some shift in the light, undetectable to me, she raced over until she covered them completely with her body. As they fed, she washed them vigorously with her tongue. She was firm, and brisk, and constantly on guard for danger.

In literature the hare is the very emblem of fearfulness. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare describes “a very dishonest, paltry boy…more a coward than a hare.” The Greek orator Demosthenes warned, in his speech “On the Crown,” against living “the life of a hare, in fear and trembling.” Aesop’s fable “The Hares and the Frogs” describes hares as “very timid,” saying that “the least shadow sends them scurrying in fright to a hiding place.” Yet the hare in her maternity was tenacious and courageous, and the care she took to confront a threat to her leverets showed resourcefulness rather than neglect.

Instead of being cowardly, the hare and her leverets were careful. Rather than being fearful, they were inquisitive, lively and even sociable.

Hares are almost invariably described as solitary, but I watched as over the following weeks the hare and her leverets returned over the wall each day. Long after they were weaned they appeared to retain a link with each other, contrary to most accounts of hares’ habits, and would often arrive in the garden, singly or together, to rest or feed briefly. Eventually, the mother hare’s leverets melted into the landscape and stopped returning.

Like their mother’s, their pelt would change with the seasons, and male hares in particular are believed to disperse from their place of birth as they reach sexual maturity, a biological urge designed to improve their reproductive prospects. I was unlikely ever to see them again. The hare had given birth to them in secret, and they had never come into the house. It was only by chance that I had learnt of their existence, and been able to catch glimpses of them through the window. Still, I was sad to see them go, but it felt as if the circle had been completed, and I was pleased that her offspring were fully wild.

I knew now that she knew everything necessary for her own care, survival and indeed reproduction. She needed nothing from me other than that I do her no harm, which might serve as a motto for all wild animals. All she required was a little space, a patch of sun in which to lie, and peace. This realisation made her continued presence in the garden and the house all the more precious, since it was by choice.

In ten years’ time, the hedge would be “laid” by hand, with each stem cut nearly completely through just above ground level so it can be bent over and fastened to the ground, creating a horizontal structure from which a mass of new thick side shoots grows, thickening over time into a natural windbreak, a home for dormice, hedgehogs and insects; a dank haven for mushrooms and fungi and lichen; and a rich source of food for songbirds. Every six yards or so we planted a taller specimen that, unlike the rest of the hedge, would be left to grow over time into a tall, spreading tree.

As well as introducing new plants, I began to learn what to let alone, realising with a sense of shame at my ignorance that the nettles beyond the wall—which I had always previously chopped down every summer—were essential to the red admiral, peacock and painted lady butterflies which laid their eggs upon the leaves, so that their caterpillars might feed on them. Likewise, the long grass behind the house that had fortuitously provided shelter for the leverets now became a magnet for goldfinches, which somehow found their way, amid the open fields, to this undisturbed spot rich in seed and insects.

The hare is deeply devoted to its offspring and dreads both the designs of huntsmen and the attacks of foxes; and it has no less a horror of the attacks of birds, and even more so of the cry of ravens and of eagles. For there is no treaty of peace between these birds and it. —Aelian (c. 175–235 AD), On the Nature of Animals

I saw the hare pressed up against the wall in the narrow gap between the curtain edge and the bookcase, nosing something at her feet. Not long after, the hare left the house and washed herself at length just outside the door. I watched as she then eased her way into the middle of the sage bush, plucking ravenously at the young green leaves. As I considered what she might do next, she sprang in long bounds towards the end of the hedge nearest the fruit trees, and sank into the deep cover, out of sight.

The curtain was absolutely still and hung as straight as ever, with no perceptible bulge or misalignment. Holding my breath, I pulled it a few inches away from the wall, and looked behind it. There, pressed closely together, with dark chocolate fur and bottomless, coal-black eyes, were a pair of leverets. They lay with their muzzles to the wall, their ears squeezed tightly to their backs. Neither of the two had a white mark on its forehead (suggesting the theory that pairs of leverets are always marked in this way is not correct), but in all other respects they were copies of their mother.

I knew from my research that a doe hare has on average eight leverets a year. This rate of fertility continues until a female hare is between four and six years old, if she lives that long. I was now aware of the hare having had two sets of leverets—the three born the previous summer, and now this pair of spring leverets. I crept out of the room. I was staggered by the level of trust the hare had shown. She had given birth in absolute secrecy and silence. She had fed her leverets, settled them and then left, trusting that they would be safe with me.

I noticed another puzzling detail. I could see one pair of creamy forepaws protruding slightly from under the bottom edge of the curtain, curved like little half-moons. Next to these, I saw a single paw pointing sole-up towards the sky, with its toes—already complete with minuscule claws—curled inwards like a fist. That’s a hind leg, I thought. It should not face up that way.

What is wrong with it? I wondered. Is it paralysed? How will it survive? Recalling how much I had feared for the hare’s life when she was a leveret, I felt out of my depth all over again.

I washed my hands and doused them with a little of the milk supplement I had used to feed the hare when she was a newborn, so that, if I now left any traces on her leveret, it might at least be a familiar scent. I pulled the curtain aside carefully and picked up the leveret to examine its hind legs. It made quiet puffing noises of anxiety—a touching series of soft, warning grunts—but did not seem to be in pain. I tried gently folding its legs underneath its body as I placed it back down on the carpet.

I realised I would have to put my trust in nature.

It occurred to me that she might react aggressively if I accidentally got between her and her leverets, or could generally be more wary of me. I received my answer just before nightfall, when the hare slipped back into the house. She came straight up to me in the kitchen, rearing back on her hind legs and patting my thigh with her feather-light paws. I crouched down, and she leant her body against my side. She stayed close to me for a while before drawing away, in the process uttering her soft call once again.

Nothing I have found since comes close to describing the gentle sound the hare made after it had been feeding from my hand when it was a leveret, and that she continued to utter to me even after she became a mother.

In the morning, I saw from the camera recording that the hare had fed her leverets three times in the night—at ten o’clock, at two in the morning, and then at five, by which time it was already light; a far more frequent feeding pattern than that described in the studies I had read, which asserted that mother hares only nurse their young once in twenty-four hours, after sunset.

She sat on her haunches, her body at forty-five degrees to the ground, her front legs spread in a wide stance to form a tent above and around her offspring as they suckled. They climbed over each other in their haste to press close to her, kneading her chest with their tiny paws.

Her final act was to scrape the carpet nearby, turning in circles as she did this, as if she were erasing her tracks or piling up non-existent grass and soil around the form to mask its smell. She used her long front legs for this as well, first one and then the other, in a curiously slow and delicate manner.

When she had finished, she leapt three feet or so away in a single bound, as if to break the trail leading up to the form. I noticed in the morning that she had also gathered—and presumably eaten—the few microscopic droppings I’d seen on the floor after the birth. This was all behaviour I had not had a chance to witness with her previous leverets.

I marvelled at the strength of their instinct to remain concealed. We think of youthful beings as impetuous and uncontrollable. But the lessons of millennia of their species’ survival kept these frail animals pinned in place, even in the alien surroundings of a house, for the roughly sixteen hours of daylight at that time of the year.

We had crossed another barrier in the human–animal relationship—in whatever light it was that she viewed me, she trusted me near her young.

She stood guard at intervals for the rest of the night, watching over them in their different corners of the room and touching them very gently with her nose, before slipping away into the garden. I never saw her carry them in her mouth, as it is sometimes suggested hares do.

I watched as the weaker one slowly gained control of its legs, and began to be able to keep pace with its smaller sibling. A week passed and the leverets were still in the house. I waited for the night that she would lead them outside, which I hoped would come soon, so that they would be able to adapt to life in the wild.

Ere I speak how the hare should be hunted, it is to be known that the hare is king of all venery…for certain it is the most marvellous beast that is. —Edward of Norwich, The Master of Game, 1406