THE COMMON HARE 
with his permission, I published in “ The Zoologist,” which I was then 
editing. His remarks are worth reproducing here. He wrote; 
” My keeper, J. Shave, found a hare’s form last week containing five 
leverets, not more than a day old; they were evidently one litter, for they 
were all of one size. Shave, who has had a long and wide experience, 
tells me he has never found more than three in any hare out of the many 
hundreds he has paunched, and that one is the usual number in the case of 
a young hare, and two in the case of an old one.”* 
Unlike rabbits, which are born underground, naked, and blind, young 
hares at birth are deposited in a ” form,” are clothed with fur, and have 
the eyes open. They are thus sooner enabled to shift for themselves, and 
escape their enemies. In time of danger they are often transported from 
their place of birth by the parent, which carries them one by one in her 
mouth as a cat carries her kittens, to be concealed in a place of greater 
safety. Moreover, they are not deposited in one spot, but at a little distance 
apart, which serves still further to protect them from enemies such as 
stoats, weasels and foxes. 
Voice.— 'Vhe doe hare visits her young in turn to suckle them, and gives 
them notice of her approach by a faint cry, which may be heard by an atten- 
tive listener on a still day at the proper season. It is not a little curious that 
Gilbert White, when penning the truly descriptive line in his ‘‘ Naturalist’s 
Summer Evening Walk,” 
What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed, 
had not something to say of the cry of the parent hare to its young. In his 
thirty -fourth letter to Dames Barrington he gives an account of a leveret 
that was suckled by a cat which called it ” with little short inward notes of 
complacency such as they use towards their kittens,” when the leveret 
came ‘‘gamboling after”; but we are not told that the latter made any cry 
in response, as happens when a leveret is called by its natural parent. 
Jesse, in his ‘‘ Scenes and Occupations of a Country Life ” (1853, p. 310), 
writes: ‘‘ When hares are seeking their young at night in order to suckle 
them they utter a faint cry something like the feeble bleat of a fawn, and the 
leverets answer it, but in a still more feeble tone.” This observation has 
since been confirmed by the late H. A. Macpherson in the volume on the 
Hare in Longmans’ ‘‘ Fur and Feather” series. An observant gamekeeper 
in the north of England informed Mr Millais that he could hear this cry of 
The Zoologist, 1888, pp. 259-260. 
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