To the insular Britisher there are only two sorts of hares, the brown and the blue. Possibly they cross breed, but naturalists are mostly opposed to this view. However, if they do not cross, the writer has seen specimens in Caithness which he could not assign to either race. Nowhere else in Scotland does there seem to be much ground inhabited by both species.

The blue hare is not only a creature of the moors, but of the top moors. The brown hare never goes up there by any chance but he often occupies moors of low level bordering the cultivation. In Caithness the highest tops are usually not very high, and the blue hares are often found on the moor only a few feet above sea-level. Consequently there are opportunities for cross breeding which in the other counties rarely exist.

Hares are said to be very prolific, but as a matter of fact they increase only very slowly: what they might do in more favourable circumstances is another matter. One writer affirms that when a brace was confined in a walled garden there were 57 hares counted at the end of one year. That is possibly correct, and yet the hare does not breed well in confinement, which is the reason that parks are more often devoted to deer and sheep than to hares, even when they are nominally hare parks. The late Lord Powerscourt introduced brown hares into his park in Ireland, where they did not increase; and the late Mr. Assheton-Smith, of Vaynol Park, introduced the blue Alpine hare there. In Ireland the latter is indigenous, but does not in winter change to white, with tips of black upon its ears, as it does in Scotland and upon the Continent.

Country Life has lately reproduced a photograph of a family of six brown leverets, and it is evidently wrong to affirm that from two to five is the limit of numbers produced, as was done in Country Life’s Shooting Book. Seven is the greatest number reported, but this requires confirmation. What has given the impression that two or three are the usual numbers produced is the fact that the hare does not seem to confine herself to one nest. All her eggs are not put in one basket, and this is instinctive wisdom; for little leverets give out a good deal of scent even when quite young, and are easily found by foxes and dogs. Cats are not fond of ranging the open fields, but prefer hedgerow and covert, so that they are more dangerous to young rabbits than to leverets, which are generally placed in the open fields without any sort of nest or other protection than the great space about them.

Very large bags of hares have frequently been killed. Lord Mansfield’s Perthshire bag of blue hares once reached very nearly 1300 in the day to five guns, and over 1000 brown hares are said to have been killed in the day quite recently. That the author has not verified, but formerly they must have been nearly as plentiful in Suffolk and Norfolk as they are now in parts of Bohemia and Hungary. Count Karolyi, for some years Hungarian Ambassador to the Court of St. James, once attempted to make a record: he killed to his own gun 600 hares in five hours’ shooting. It is not this unique feat for which Hungary is most noted, but for its constant supply over a large number of days. There they do not usually kill hares during partridge shooting, but delay the big drives until November. Nevertheless, at Tot-Megyr, six days’ shooting by nine guns produced 7500 hares and 2500 partridges. Probably Mindszent, in the south of Hungary, holds the record for a day at hares, for 3000 were killed there by Count Alexander Pallavicini’s ten guns.

Big bags of hares are no new thing in that country, for as long ago as 1753 over 18,000 hares were killed with equal proportions of partridges in 20 days’ shooting by 23 guns, including the Emperor of Austria and the Princess Charlotte. In Suffolk, in 1806, a complaint of the number of hares left on one estate was followed in the early spring by the killing of 6012. Whether this slaughter satisfied the farmers or no is not stated. Probably the biggest shoots of hares occur in the United States, where the animals, almost precisely like our own brown hares, are called “jack rabbits.” They have become so troublesome to farmers that the latter turn out in regular armies when the “trouble” becomes worse than usual, and the “jack rabbits” are done to death in countless numbers. Another kind of hare found in the States is the “cotton tail,” which in all outward appearance is precisely like our common rabbit, except that it does not burrow. It is the perquisite of the nigger dog, and if he is there, of the nigger dog’s master.

The “jack rabbits” give splendid coursing and a fine scent for hounds; the “cotton tails” do neither, but gun-dogs invariably point them. The hunting of the hare is probably the oldest of all sports now practised. It was rated high by Xenophon more than three centuries before the Christian era, and Xenophon would have made an excellent master of harriers in our day if we could have induced him to leave his nets at home. The fox never took precedence of the hare until earth-stopping was invented, and without it the former would even now be the less worthy as a quarry.

The brown hare prefers the open country to the woods, and is never found in the latter until haytime and harvest have driven it out of the fields. Even then it may take to a fallow field in preference to the woods, and the author has known a little 10 acre field to have more than 100 hares in it upon such an occasion. In wet dripping weather—that is, when the drip falls from the trees in covert along with the falling leaf—hares prefer to make forms in the open fields. These they will return to daily for weeks together, unless they are disturbed. But if they are put off their forms they do not often come back to them again, but make new ones. Consequently, if it is desired to have a great day’s covert shooting, including hares, the open country should be beaten for them several days before. The fact that they are disturbed will send them into the coverts. On the other hand, after the coverts are beaten, not a hare will be found in them for some time, whereas all the pheasants that are left alive will be back to roost the next day at latest, unless they have been driven to coverts that they know and like equally well.

People affect to despise shooting hares, and when they are driven out of coverts into the open they are of course rather more easy than pheasants fluttering up at a corner; but in high undergrowth, in covert or out, they are much more often missed than pheasants. In standing barley they are very difficult, and if turnips are really high they are not easy there. But the author has rarely seen clever hare shooting when the beasts have been driven up to fences in the low country, and up to the hilltops in Scotland. It is true that if only one or two hares come together, it is simplicity itself to handle them, but suppose four hares are each seen 20 yards apart coming up to your stand. If you can kill the four, you understand woodcraft as well as shooting. If you do not know the former, you will get one or at most two hares and frighten the others away. Your object will be to get all the hares nearly together before you take the farthest off one, then the next farthest off, and you will have two very much scared hares starting probably from your very feet for your second gun. The shooting then becomes extremely difficult, because it has to be very smart indeed. Sometimes, instead of four you may have twenty hares all within 80 yards, and it has been known that by shooting at the first within range all the rest have escaped without a shot. It is the habit of blue hares to follow each other up the runs through the heather or over the moss and stones; when one stops, the others seeing him stop too. Consequently, the way to get them together is only to stop the first hare when he has approached near and is also out of sight of the others behind, which any little unevenness of the ground accomplishes. A sharp “click,” which was most easily accomplished by cocking a gun in the days before the hammerless, is enough. One stone rapped once only on another will do it. But the hare must not see that, or any other movement, or he will be off at once. If he has not the advantage of the wind, and so cannot get the scent of the guns, a hare would run between a shooter’s legs without seeing him if he stood absolutely still and bestrode the hare track. But it is the “absolute” that makes all the difference. Some people say that a hare cannot see straight in front of it, but this is a mistake; it can detect the smallest movement although directly in front, and if it will almost run against you, it will not allow you to walk from the direct front up to it as it lies in its form.

When hares are wild, they sit high in their forms, and can be seen from a long distance. However, when they mean to lie close, they are remarkably difficult to see even upon open ground, except to those who know what to look for, and the most experienced will often pass them. Private coursers, especially when mounted, get extremely clever at finding hares in their seats. In beating for them, when they are not wild, the drivers who take a straight course will miss three-parts of the hares, but if they zigzag, making half-turns suddenly, every hare will believe itself seen and will run.

In beating flat country for hares, very much the same order as in partridge driving in the open, and as in pheasant beating in covert, has to be adopted. Stops and flanks are a necessity, but in driving moorlands a very different system is adopted. The hares there will all make up hill, no matter which way the beaters walk, so that a continuous circuit round the hills, beginning at the lowest level and cork-screwing upwards, is the plan if there are not enough beaters to cover the slope at one operation. If there are, the beating is done as if it were the desire to drive the hares along the slope or face of the hill, but as they will all pass along the front face of the drivers and mount the hill either near or far on, the guns will take up hidden positions upon the tops. Any other system of driving blue hares has been found from experience to be more or less misdirected energy. These animals are not very much liked in the deer forests, because the deer understand the hares’ movements as well as if they talked to each other, and a startled hare usually means also a startled stag in the stalking season. But in grouse ground the hares should not be kept very low in Scotland. Nowhere are you very far away from a deer forest and eagles, and the latter are satisfied to leave the grouse alone if they can get blue hare in summer and white hare in winter. The Alpine hare is much easier for an eagle to catch than either grouse or ptarmigan.

As to brown hares, they can only be plentiful where the relations between landowner and tenant are of the very best. The latter can, if they like, kill hares all the year round. Good land, a liberal landlord, and yearly tenancies are the conditions under which hares can thrive. The author likes to see plenty of them as proofs that the tenants are not unsportsmanlike, and that the keepers are friendly with the farmers and enemies to the poachers. Opposites in both cases have not been quite unknown.

It has been said that hares can be “called up” by poachers. Perhaps that is so; the only cry of the hare the author has heard is that distress note that will often, on the contrary, drive away the other hares. If they will come to call, they must be in the habit of calling. It is the note of the doe hare that is supposed to be imitated. If she calls her young she has no cause to call the “jack”; she is found by him by the trail scent, and is worried far more by his attentions than she likes. It is not uncommon to see half a dozen “jacks” persecuting one doe hare, and continuing to do so for hours if not for days together. The “jack” seems to hunt the trail of the doe when it is hours old, and long after any harrier would notice it.

The esteem in which the hare was held in the Middle Ages is shown by a verse attached to an English translation of the Norman-French Le Art de Venerie, by William Twici, huntsman to King Edward II.:—

Who wrote the verse does not appear to be accurately known; evidently it was not Twici.