I have continued (almost uninterruptedly) with my daily six-mile walk
for many months. (At some point I hope to return to my previous eight-mile walk.)
One of the special pleasures of my current, shorter route is that I often get
to see several hares. I have the impression that few people see hares these
days – it would help if they got out of their cars. I have named one of them Harry
Hare, and a pair Henry and Henrietta Hare. I am unable to distinguish them in
order to be able to recognise them, so it is possible that, over the period of
a week, I see lots of different hares, although I consider that to be unlikely.
I have no actual knowledge of their
genders, but I assume that the pair I have named Henry and Henrietta, who are
typically together, and always within a few hundred metres of a particular section
of my walk, are respectively male and female. The hare that I have named Harry
is always on his own, and might be seen almost anywhere after the first mile of
leaving the house and climbing to the top of the downs. Confusingly, this
morning, I saw two largish lagomorphs in the distance. They could have been
rabbits, and they were beside a small wood where rabbits are frequently to be
seen. However, their size suggested that they were hares. Yet, this was a place
where I have often seen Harry Hare. So, if they were hares, either Henry and
Henrietta decided to adventure away from their usual territory, or Harry now
has a girlfriend (Harriet). Of course, if they were hares, then they might have
been hares I had not seen before (Horace and Hortense?). Twenty minutes later,
I rounded a corner and startled a lone hare beside the verge. This was at a
place where I would typically see Henry and Henrietta together. The hare ran
off (‘hared off’) in an easterly direction across a wheat field. A further
twenty minutes later, five minutes after having begun the return journey (three
miles there, three miles back), there was a hare sitting in the middle of the
lane. Wary, it caught sight of me instantly, and pelted along the lane away
from me. Sometimes I have been treated to a very close-up view of a hare. This
has usually been when I have managed to stop walking the instant I catch sight
of it and stand very still. When I have been fortunate, the hare has failed to
register my presence and hopped to within a few metres of me. In Durham, when
out for my walks, I would very occasionally (once every couple of years) see a
hare in the distance, running across the middle of some or other large field
(rabbits tend to stay closer to field edges). I guess that I would think less
kindly towards hares were they to invade my garden and orchard, but hares do
not care for proximity to human habitation.
