Hare today

As today is World Pangolin Day I spent some time listening to nature podcasts. When I get into ‘information consumption’ mode it distracts me sufficiently from being in limbo. A key wildlife fact I learnt was that brown hares were brought to the UK (in the Roman era or Iron Age; it seems disputed), and are not endemic to here. I’d never thought about the native distribution of hares before.

I went on a long, slow walk. People were busy doing things in their gardens as it was so surprisingly mild. I meandered to the village of Fulbourn on the outskirts of Cambridge, poked around the churchyard of Saint Vigor’s and admired the old village centre. It brought to mind the old children’s TV series The Borrowers, where the family winds up in a picturesque cottage in a model village, and everything is stone walls, clipped gardens and beige paths. Rural England has lots of real villages that mimic this quite well.