Another Life: All struts and hinges, the hares take their time in loping across the duach, or even down the boreen, ahead of me and the dog. It's as if, by late summer, we've all got used to each other, writes Michael Viney
Some hares are huge - big as kangaroos, or so it can seem when the sun is rising. A young one, small enough to squeeze around the gate, paused outside my window for a moment of tender regard (mine, I mean; those liquid eyes, that sparkling fur!). I thought of Greenland, years ago, and the snowy, powder-puff hares that roamed around the tent, munching yellow poppies at midnight.
It's also years since I've seen a freshly-born leveret, crouched tight to the ground like a furry computer-mouse: you need to be out walking the fields and not thinking about hares at all. It's textbook wisdom that hares are "absentee" mothers. The female gives birth in the open and her babies - usually two of them, in two or three litters a year - are born fully furred, with their eyes open.
Within hours of the first nursing, they have moved a little way from the birthplace and lie crouched and still in the grass, several metres apart. They gather again at the birthplace after sunset, when the mother returns to feed them, sitting bolt upright to watch for danger. The feed lasts only five minutes or so, after which the leverets disperse again, settling at new places. As they get older, they rest further and further away and the nightly suckling is ever more brief; after about a month, they're on their own.
Such absentee parenting, by both hares and rabbits, is rare in mammal behaviour. An extreme example is that of the Asian tree shrew, which gives birth in a separate "nursery" nest, goes on sleeping with her mate, and nurses her young only once every 48 hours. The female rabbit has a similar regime to the hare, returning nightly, but at least she remembers to block up the entrance to the breeding tunnel with soil.
Rather than the "primitive" behaviour it once seemed, the absenteeism of the lagomorphs (hares and rabbits) is reckoned a strategy of sorts to protect the young from predators. But is the mountain hare, Lepus timidus hibernicus, quite as timid or neglectful as it seems? Kieran Buckley, a dedicated naturalist, has worked for seven years as a gamekeeper on the wild grey partridge conservation project in the bogs of Co Offaly. Twice, he tells me, he has seen hares apparently defending their young against hen harriers, among the largest and fiercest of predators on leverets. On the first occasion, the harrier flew in low circles for 15 minutes "while the hare chased the bird, and when, I presume, the harrier got too close to the leveret, the hare jumped up at the harrier, an unbelievable sight to witness and one I would not have believed". The scene was repeated when another female harrier was hunting along wild grasses planted (for the partridge) on an old ridge of abandoned peat. Again, the hare was "running up and down, chasing and jumping at the bird". It is observation to set beside a story told me by a naturalist friend in north Co Mayo. He and another man were building a wall on farmland when they saw a hare lope across a muddy field beside them and enter a thicket of gorse beyond a bank. It emerged and retraced its steps, taking the same path across the field; the men went on building.
Then the hare appeared on the same track again, this time picking her way quite slowly - "hobbling", as my friend put it - and with something slumped across its shoulders "like a dead cowboy draped over a saddle". As the animal passed, about 50 metres away, both men exclaimed: "It's got a young one on its back!" My friend pursued the hare, which speeded up "in a most awkward fashion", and reached the gorse before him. Then it reappeared, the bump gone from its back, and "shot off like a bullet".
From such exceptional events, we used to spin something called folklore.
My recent column on the spread of ragwort and bracken could have done more to explain their "noxious" character. An alkaloid in ragwort, in particular, can bring death to cattle and horses left short of water and looking for juicy stems. A reader in Co Wicklow is alarmed by both the burgeoning banks of ragwort and by the concern expressed in Britain last month by the Equine Veterinary Association. In both islands, this is a bumper year for ragwort, and given what it can do to a horse's liver, allowing the plant to spread is not just lazy but potentially cruel.
As for bracken, its fruiting spores can be seriously carcinogenic; late August is not a good time to be taking short cuts through its thickets.