Tormalkin

Refection is an unattractive habit characteristic of rabbits and hares. I remember in my schooldays being puzzled at droppings in the stomachs of rabbits I dissected. It was explained that the animals ate their own faeces to stimulate emptying of the stomach first thing in the morning. Now it is known that this is a means of returning vitamins produced in the digestive process for reabsorption in the gut.

In November 1960 I came with my wife and baby first daughter to Aberfeldy as a locum in the practice of Dr. Swanson. We were put up in a local guest house, Cruachan. That autumn there were a glut of white hares which suffered badly from traffic on the high road across the moors from Crieff. These road casualties were so common that hare soup was served for supper every night for the three weeks of our stay. It was delicious and flavoured with cinnamon but became monotonous; it might have been better with ‘honey and caraway comfits’ (whatever they were!).

Mrs Fitzgibbon in her Traditional Scottish Cooking [Mercat 1980] gives several dishes including ‘Bawd Bree’ made from either Brown or Blue hare especially the latter: ‘take 1 white hare (most often used for this magnificent hare soup) cooked with shin of beef, mixed vegetables, herbs, spices and port wine with the addition of rowan jelly before serving’

Captain Edmund Burt writing in 1754 in his Letters from the North of Scotland [republished by Birlinn in 1998] commented ‘it is no uncommon thing, when the mountains are deep in snow, for us to see hares almost as white as snow, which when they descend into these plains for sustenance; but although we have hunted several of them for a while, yet always without success, for they keep near the feet of the hills, and, immediately on being started, make to the heights, where the scent is lost, and they baffle all pursuit.’

Burt’s comment reminds me that, on a later visit to Aberfeldy in the 1970s, I had the embarrassment of seeing my young black labrador, careering miles over a grouse moor in pursuit of white hares which seemed to spring up from every heather tuft. The excited dog was deaf to all my commands and whistles.

The Blue hare is an ancient species which has been with us from Stone Age. Recently there have been reports of white hares being exterminated on some grouse moors in the belief that they harbour ticks which also attack grouse. The logic behind this is unclear and it seems odd that a bird, Scottish enough to include scoticus in its scientific name giving evidence of its antiquity, should seriously be affected by a mammal which has been present since the Pleistocene.

However, numbers of blue hares appear to fluctuate in parallel with those of grouse. Alpine hare success is closely related to grouse moor management; where burning of heather encourages the heather to be more nutritious. With declining maintenance of grouse moors and less heather burning there has been a reduction in white hare populations.

‘The mountain hare whitens and darkens by spasmodic degrees as the seasons ebb and flow. It runs before the wind, keeps mostly to the leeward side of the hill, ranges with the weather from the highest adventures of the brown hare at around a thousand feet to the plateau three thousand feet higher.’(Jim Crumley)

©Robin Hull

NOTE: This and other essays on mammals in Comment are extracts from ‘A History of Scottish Mammals’ due to be published by Birlinn this Spring.