Farming
Welcome return of spring’s chiff-chaffs Country Diary With AJ Selby April brings the primrose sweet; scatters daisies at our feet. You never stop learning, or seeing something new in nature. Recently, during a walk across the downs, I had pause to watch some hares at play. Two males were sparring – boxing as it’s known – and not having lived in hare country, I had never seen this behaviour before. It’s usually one male claiming dominance over another at the start of the mating season although it’s also thought that sometimes it’s the females resisting the attention of the males. Was life ever thus! Old countrymen still call them
jack rabbits and that name was carried over the pond to the States by the earlier settlers there. They are a most interesting animal that is naturally shy but able to run at speeds up to 35mph.
We’re in it together
Baby hares, called leverets, are born furred and with their eyes open unlike rabbits, so they can fend for themselves soon after birth. They don’t burrow underground like rabbits do but lie down and give birth in depressions in the grass called a form. Richard Jeffries, the prolific country writer from the second half of the 19th century, was adept at finding the flat, matted grass that was their home and he was said to have caught hares for the pot by creeping within a few feet of one resting, placing his hat on the ground in front of it and while it kept its attention on the hat, he would walk round the back of the animal and grab it. Apocryphal in all probability but they can lie still for a long time before setting off when disturbed. Jeffries was a remarkable naturalist and
writer who died of TB aged just 38. He lived near Swindon, where he learnt to study nature on the Wiltshire downs with a keen eye and then put his observations into elegant prose. A contemporary writer at the time on first reading Jeffries wrote: “Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not.” Taking my early morning stroll on March 19 along the riverbank, I heard that familiar and welcoming sound. I looked up towards the top branches of a gnarled old oak and there, silhouetted against a cloudy sky, I saw him. Just the one. Singing his heart out. Chiff-chaff-chaffchiff-chiff-chaff. Yes, the chiff-chaffs are back and spring has arrived.
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