A Hare's Breadth

Photo: Jo Sinclair

I may have missed the morning boxing match. Out early to watch brown hares, I see several groups of four and five. They have mostly settled but there are eruptions of energy, breath steaming in the misty sunshine. The females fend off the males with a neat flick of dew in the face.

In East Anglia vast fields of monoculture can stretch for miles. Uninterrupted by hedge, tree, ditch or sklylark plot they are denuded of biodiversity. Today beyond the bright yellow stain of herbicide I find hares congregating in healthy numbers. Neighbouring acres of finely tilled flinty soil are flecked with white chalk and hide a dot that transpires to be a hare flat against the ground, camouflage finely tuned.

Photo: Jo Sinclair

I watch a couple sitting placidly in the morning sunlight. A third animal sets them leaping back and forth across a ditch until the interloper motors away across the winter wheat, nose to the ground. The search for oestrus is ramping up: it is the season of the 'mad March hare'. A black clod shifts into gear. This one has a strange gait, like a rusty penny farthing. Stiff-legged, bulky and greying: I think it may be old. It seems so strange to see an aged wild animal; the odds are against them reaching this state. But I have watched foxes that had lost their wile and a decrepit, frightened roe deer that I felt sorry for.

Two buzzards mew and three alert hares make a diversion into a copse. Nearly home, but with a flat tyre from a flailed hedge, I get caught in a hailstorm of white nitrogenus fertiliser pellets that ping against my cheeks.

Photo: Jo Sinclair

Apparently 'March hare'  is a misnomer; hares can breed all year round. But we love phenological country tradition and folklore all the more keenly as climate change advances. Temperatures of 21 degrees in February? We bask in its glory with increasing unease. Through cloudy vision my grandmother notices the azure sky. Ninety-six and mired in short-term memory fog, she spontaneously quotes country proverbs and frets about the butterflies emerging from hibernation in her garden shed. Due to illness she had to abandon her home suddenly nine months ago. But clarity of memory bugs her too; she imagines a trapped butterfly fluttering hopelessly against the glass.