I have chosen the hare and the swallow as the main characters for my exploration of home and belonging. The hare, like all other mammals in New Zealand was introduced. The hare was not always part of the New Zealand landscape. It was introduced by European settlers in the nineteenth century. Hares were brought to the country for sport and familiarity, a reminder of the countryside they had left behind. Over time, the animal became part of the land itself, living in paddocks, roadsides, and long grass across the country.
Today the hare sits in a strange place in New Zealand history. They are not native, but now deeply woven into the memory of the landscape. The introduction of the hare got me thinking about what that must have been like for this animal to experience ‘introduction’ to this ‘new’ land and equally for the local Maori population to experience the hare onto the shores of New Zealand. When the white man came to New Zealand there were no mammals, only birds. Everything mammalian was brought here from somewhere else.
The hares were introduced deliberately (not naturally). They were primarily the European brown hare (Lepus europaeus) in the 1850s–1870s. They were released in Canterbury in 1851. Hares were introduced to provide animals for sport hunting, a familiar pastime for British settlers. They were also a food source (jugged hare) and used to recreate aspects of the British countryside. Certain acclimatization societies — groups formed by settlers — actively imported and released hares and other animals.
Hares thrived and spread on the open plains (like Canterbury) which suited them well. There were few, if any natural predators and the winters in New Zealand were mild compared to Europe. Unlike rabbits (which became a severe pest), hares did not multiply as explosively. Nevertheless hares still became widespread across the South Island.
How They Got To New Zealand
Hares were transported by ship from Britain and sometimes Australia. They were carried in cages with feed during the long sea voyages and released into rural areas once they arrived. Especially in open grasslands like Canterbury. I find myself contemplating what it must have been like for those first introduced hares, as their cages were opened and they ran across new terrain for the first time. Everything new, nothing familiar.
The sky was huge, a clean hard blue. The air carried strange perfumes: resin, fern, salt, damp shadow. He tasted it with every breath, trying to translate it into something familiar.
The men set him down as one might set down a tool. He ran for his life. Then for a while he remained still, ears lifting and swiveling like antennae. There were no hedgerows here, no neat margins of field and ditch, no stone walls offering their long-learnt shelter. There was open land and bush that seemed to keep its secrets close, a tangle of unfamiliar greens. The ground was different beneath his feet—springier in places, gritty in others, threaded with roots that didn’t run like European roots. Soil that did not smell like home. Soil with a history he could not read….
Hares and the Maori
Because Māori communities were living alongside these changes. Reactions to the hares would have varied by place and time (as with many introduced species). Direct, early Māori commentary on hares is scarce in mainstream published sources. What is plausible (but less directly evidenced in primary Māori accounts for hares is that in some areas, introduced mammals could become new game/food opportunities. This happened with various introduced species over time. While elsewhere they were regarded negatively once they began to affect gardens, crops, or mahinga kai landscapes. “Pest” narratives grew in the late 1800s.
Direct evidence of what early Maori specifically thought about hares is actually pretty thin in the public record. Most writing about hare releases came from settler acclimatization societies and colonial newspapers, not Maori authors. In a Lyttelton Times piece (30 May 1877) about hare-raising mentions hares around a “Maori pah” and the need to save cabbages. This strongly implying concerns about hares damaging Māori gardens/crops (at least in some places).
The absence of direct commentary in these sources doesn’t mean Māori had no views. It simply reflects who was publishing printed material at the time (English-language settler newspapers). Māori views were often carried in oral histories (kōrero ā waha), waiata, or unpublished journal accounts rather than settler press.
Māori likely ate hare in some places, especially where hunting/trapping supplemented diets. Rabbits are far more frequently documented as a staple wild meat than hares.
The Hare’s Early Years
The first great feature of its life would have been dislocation. A European hare is shaped by open farmland, rough grassland, hedgerows, seasonal cold, and a known set of predators and rhythms. In New Zealand in 1850, especially in settled districts, it would have encountered open ground in places. But also very different vegetation, different soils, different light, and a very different soundscape. There were no old hedgerow systems. No deep, inherited network of familiar cover. No long co-evolved relationship with the land. Its daily life would have centered on finding food, shelter, and safe ground.
Food may actually have been one of the easier problems in some districts. Especially where settlers had already created pasture or disturbed the land. Hares do well in open country, feeding on grasses, herbs, shoots, and crops. If released into developing colonial landscapes, the hare might have found patches of usable forage fairly quickly. Recently altered land often suits introduced grazing animals better than dense native bush does.
Shelter would have been harder. Hares do not burrow like rabbits; they rely on forms, shallow depressions in grass or sheltered ground. In Britain and Europe, they know how to disappear into a field system they are evolutionarily tuned to read. In New Zealand, an introduced hare would have had to work out where concealment actually functioned. Dense native bush was often too closed and strange for a grassland-running animal. Fern land, rough pasture, river terraces, dune country, and scrub margins may have suited it better.
Predation in 1850 would have been mixed. On one hand, New Zealand lacked the full suite of mammalian predators that hares knew in Europe. There were no native foxes. On the other hand, settlers themselves were a major danger, along with dogs. Cats were present in colonial environments. Later in the nineteenth century, stoats and ferrets would become a much greater threat. In 1850 those pressures were not yet fully present. So early on, a hare may have experienced a strange kind of partial release. Some of the old dangers gone, some new human-linked dangers replacing them.
That does not mean that life would have been easy. It may actually have felt more exposed. Even with fewer familiar predators, the hare would have lacked confidence in the landscape. A prey animal depends on recognition as much as on speed. It survives by reading cover, scent, line of sight, escape routes, and seasonal shifts. In a new country, all of that would have had to be relearned.
Its life would also have been shaped by the new weather and seasonality. The hare’s body expected a northern seasonal pattern. In New Zealand, the seasons were reversed. Depending on where it was released, winter might have been less severe than what its instincts had prepared for. So an introduced hare in 1850 may have experienced an odd bodily disorientation. Breeding times, coat change, daylight rhythms, and feeding pressures would all have felt subtly “wrong” until it could adapt.
Socially, it would probably have been lonely at first unless several hares were released together. Early introductions often involved small numbers, and that creates another difficulty: a scattered founding population may struggle to establish. A single hare or tiny group could live for a time in a state of isolation, despite all the stress that was present for breeding and survival.
If it survived long enough, though, it may have done surprisingly well. Hares are adaptable. In open or semi-open country, especially where settlers were transforming land into pasture, they could begin to find a niche. So the life of an introduced hare, not unlike the lives of the first settlers would likely have been harsh at first. As time went on opportunities would have arisen where colonial landscape change created suitable habitat.