CLOSE LOOK AT A HARE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 762, 26 February 1954, Page 20

CLOSE LOOK AT A HARE

by

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 2

UDSON or Darwin or J. A. Thomson-I can’t at present remember which-says that we libel hares when we call them timid. It is not timidity, he argues, when they fly like the wind from their enemies. It is capacity and wisdom. Nor is it cowardice when they fight with their feet and not with their teeth. That is intelligence. They can, and often do, use both feet and teeth;

but the use of their hind feet in battle is as sensible, and

can be as. effective, as the devastating rip of a kangaroo. I am not sure that it is a convincing argument, but I thought of it tonight when I caught a hare in a rabbit trapthe first blunder of that kind I have seen a hare make-and as I stooped to pick it up, received trap and hare in the face. I don’t suggest that it was courage, or even ferocity. It was panic and unusual strength in the hind legs. But since the light was going, and the leap ‘was accompanied by a very unusual noise, half chatter and half growl, it was a very effective manoeuvre, and sheer bad luck for the hare that the inanimate trap was not as easily startled as I was.

I think vitality isa hare’s outstanding quality, and of that, too, I have had experience this week. I had a lyingdown shot from about 40 yards at one of the hares the drought has sent to feed in my garden, and only the plump of the bullet told me that I had not missed. The hare gave no sign at all. He had been moving slowly before I fired, hopping for a yard or two and then standing up to look round, and he went on in precisely the same way after the bullet hit him. I therefore fired a second time, and was again sure that I had not missed; but the only sign given by the hare was a change of direction. He had been working uphill, and now turned down. hill, moving nearly a Chain in the same deliberate way before he rolled over dead. The first ‘bullet had missed his spine by a fraction of an inch; the second had-torn his heart.

FEBRUARY 3

o 7 — HE belief that hares chew the cud came to me, I am sure, from the Bible,

or from some older person who read it in ‘the Bible: and it died

hard. Long after I knew that it was an

error I would find myself repeating what I had previously believed, namely, that the differ. ence between hares and rabbits ~ is that hares chew the cud and rabbits don’t. The fact that hares live above the ground and rabbits underneath was not, I thought, an important difference; nor did it make them different ani mals that one came into the world clothed and ‘the other naked. Chewing the cud, on the other hand, involved structural differences; two stomachs at least instead of one, and the mechanism for transferring food from one container to the other. I had often noticed, during the postmortems that al] boys conduct on the animals

they kill, that a hare has a very big heart; but although I had never noticed anything special about its stomach, I knew that there must be something special if it ruminated. And I knew that it ruminated because the Bible said so. It was, in fact, one of my priggish pleasures when I was a boy to spring that knowledge on the uninformed, and triumphantly quote my

authority if I was questioned. It did not occur to me then that the Bible could be wrong, and I must have been 30 or older before I was told that it was wrong. Now I never handle a dead hare without having another look inside to make sure. But I blundered badly today. When I tried to persuade Ng. to jug my hare,

and met resistance coloured by repug: | nance, I declared that a hare is just a long-legged rabbit. Later I felt uneasy about that statement, and secretly consulted authorities, who gave it no support at all. Hares, they all seem to say, are as far from rabbits as goats are from sheep, and in some respects a little farther. They differ anatomically, and in some matters physiologically; they don’t and can’t interbreed; there are marked differences in their chemistry. I had met Mrs. Beeton’s first requirement by catching my hare; but however faithfully I followed her instructions from .that point on, our jugged hare would not have looked, smelt, or tasted like rabbit. -_ ke *&

FEBRUARY 6

= NEED not have been so cautious the other day about the weather. The, figures for January are now available, and prove that Canterbury had its driest January for 52 years. Last week it had see hottest dav for 49 years, and the

drought is still with us. In other words, it had been a wonderful

summer for holiday makers, DUt NOL SO wonderful for any Canterbury farmer. Even the swamp farmers, one of them told me eyesterday, are getting anxious, and wish they had not tried so hard to get the sun and air into their soi] and the moisture out. "But you can’t farm for freak weather," he added. "You must do what pays most years." In his case it means deeper ditches as his land sinks, more and better feeder drains, filling up more hollows, throwing up higher and rougher furrows. Where his ditches carried three inches of water a few years ago they now carry six inches, and he looks forward to the day when they will carry nine inches, But this summer he is in trouble. His paddocks are not merely dry. They are baked hard and cracked, and he is as helpless as his sandy and dusty neighbours. "I know what to do," he assured me, "but it is not worth doing. We'll get a flood one of these days, and then I'll thank God I didn’t take panic in the drought." .. ie *

FEBRUARY 8

NE of the features-I suppose it is a consequence-of the drought has been the activity of ground-feeding birds. When I was helping Jim recently with his grass harvest I was puzzled by the flocks of starlings that followed us -until Jim told me to look into the

bags. I did, anda found the sight astonishing. In the bags

holding the rubbish caterpillars were hanging in hundreds on the jute fibres and squirming in the waste seed and straw. It could not have been an exaggeration when Jim said that the starlings must be finding millions more in the stubble. What the caterpillars were neither of us knew at the time, nor do I know yet; but a note I have seen, today by Dr. Miller makes me wonder if they were army-worms. I found it easier to identify the black crickets swarming in the grass bordering the stubble. The story, I imagine, is that more eggs are laid in dry, hot weather, and many more hatched; that there is a smaller mortality among the hatchings, and an enormous increase in the cracks and crevices of the soil in which such creatures can shelter; that birds are hampered by crisp dry grass, and get a real chance only when a mower or some other machine takes away the covering. Whatever the facts, it was incongruous to see starlings and not sparrows following the mill, and moving through the short stubble in hundreds. (To be continued)