The highlight of a recent walk in a part of the Dales I had not explored for years was hearing the mewing call of a buzzard and seeing no less than five birds in flight.

A pair had nested in a wooded gill. Four of the birds, after circling with noisy cries, flew up the gill. The fifth settled on a fencing post, where it resembled a feathered totem.

I was reminded of Colin Preston's experience with buzzards. Colin, a gamekeeper with an enlightened view about wildlife, and a passion for bird photography, put a hide in a tall tree, which swayed so alarmingly at times he tied himself to it in case the platform on which he had put the hide collapsed.

The buzzard does not look a particularly aggressive bird. It dawdles on the up-draught from a ridge, wheeling and calling. During my early morning walk from Giggleswick, via the Locks and Langcliffe, I was on the high road when I heard the sound of a peevish crow high above the ground.

It was a cry well-known to me. The crow was harrying an intruder and this turned out to be a buzzard, gloriously underlit by the rays of a sun which had only just peeped over the limestone crags to the east of the valley.

The return of the buzzard has been welcomed by bird-watchers, although gamekeepers reserve judgement on the birds. Buzzards live mainly on rabbits, of which there is an abundance. Given the chance, and they would also take young hares, which are known as leverets.

I have not seen many hares in the Dales in recent times. Perhaps the profusion of rabbits has something to do with it. The two share the same sort of environment.

Hares are not easy to find when they are at rest. A Dales poacher boasted that he could detect a hare in its "form" by the sparkle in its eye. I believed him. He once used this method to find a woodcock crouching against a litter of cast oak leaves in woodland.

The first I saw of a hare a few days ago was when it burst from a tuft of rushes and departed at speed. The "form" is the area where the animal lies up during the day. It tends to take on the shape of the body and when freshly vacated is still warm to the touch.

Spending its life on the surface of the ground, unlike the rabbit which excavates a burrow, the hare has long since developed the knack of being unobtrusive. Disturb it when the ground is as bare as a billiards table and it will snuggle down until from a distance it resembles a clod of earth.

When it runs, it outpaces most predators. Its weakness of keeping slavishly to certain runs was well-known to poachers, who in the old days knew just where to place their nets.

At a time when the Dales are verdant green with grass for silage, and when the silage operation, conducted once or twice during the growing season, keeps the vegetation short and fine, there is previous little cover for hares.

I have heard of Dales farmers who, partly for sport and partly for the pot, toured their fields in four-wheel drive vehicles, one man with a gun sitting on the bonnet waiting for a hare to appear in the headlight glare, when its eyes would look as red as rubies. The luckless animal was shot by firing down the beam of light.

The most exciting time in the annual routine of the brown hare is when it suffers from springtime "madness". One assumes it is to do with breeding, but I have seen hares "box" and pursue each other at a time when the does had already parted with their litters.

The young hares huddle under cover among rank grasses and rushes and spread out at the first opportunity, lessening the risk of the entire family perishing to a predator. The doe regularly visits the young, but the suckling season for each litter is short - possibly no more than a fortnight.

Just now the brown hares of the Dales are assuming their winter coat, which begins to show through the lighter and richer coat of summer as early as July. I had a particularly close view of a hare when my scent did not reach it. Black-tipped ears were tuned to the local wavelengths. Some five inches in length, they moved like sensitive radar scanners. The hare reared on its hind legs to peer around.

A recipe book of Yorkshire cooking in my library has details of how to "jug" hares (the same recipes might be used for "jugging" rabbits, if you still have an appetite for them following the outbreak of myxomatosis and a recurrence of this deadly and disfiguring disease).

The ingredients for one recipe, which was used as the main course at, of all occasions, a West Riding wedding reception in the 1920s, consisted of a large hare, 2lb of rump steak, a large onion stuck with cloves, one glass of port wine, butter, seasoning and flour. The blood had been set aside for the gravy. It was a novel item on the menu at a marriage breakfast.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.