Jack Rabbit Lepus campestris Bachman Called also Prairie Hare, Jackass Hare, White-tailed Jack Rabbit. Length. 25 inches. Description. Larger than any of the preceding, with very long hind legs and ears. Colour above yellowish gray, sides and back of neck lighter, below white, tail entirely white. In the northern part of its range it turns pure white in winter, farther south the change is partial or possibly does not occur at all. Range. From Western Minnesota and Iowa to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and from Central Kansas and Colorado to the Saskatchewan plains. Represented southward and westward by a group of allied species known as black-tailed jack rabbits. Cottontails of one form or another stretch all across our Continent and varying hares occur Westward in the boreal forests just as they do in the East, but the distinctively Western member of the hare tribe is the jack rabbit. From the Eastern border of the plains to the shores of the Pacific there is scarcely any spot where one form or another of the jack rabbit does not occur, but farther East it is unknown. The white-tailed jack rabbit is the one found on the Great Plains and upper part of the Great Basin. Southward and partly overlapping is the range of the Texan or black-tailed jack rabbit while in California is found still another species. Living entirely in the open, jack rabbits are more than ever dependent upon the protective colouration, speed and delicacy of hearing which are so characteristic of the whole tribe. Dr. Coues says, "The first sign one has usually of a hare which has squatted low in hopes of concealment, till its fears force it to fly, is a great bound into the air with lengthened body and erect ears. The instant it touches the ground it is up again, it does not come fairly down and gather itself for the next spring but seems to hold its legs stiffly extended, touch only its toes and rebound by the force of its impact. As it gains on its pursuers, and its fears subside, the springs grow weaker, and finally the animal squats in its tracks on its haunches with a jerk, to look and listen. One fore foot is advanced a little before the other, and the ears are held pointing in opposite directions. The attitude at such times is highly characteristic." For its home the jack rabbit has only an open "form" beneath a bush or clump of weeds; here it sleeps in sunshine and storm always on the alert for danger, ready to dash away on the instant. When the "rabbit brush" grows thick they are comparatively safe and well sheltered, but in certain bare stretches of unbroken waste land they have to seek shelter as best they may, crouching beside some white wind-bleached stalk or in the shadow of a telegraph pole. The northern species turns white in winter and so escapes observation on the snow. The young, from one to six in number, are brought forth in the form, which is simply a little space among the weeds and bushes where the grass, when there is any, has been trampled flat and perhaps slightly carpeted with loose fur. The time of birth varies from late winter to early summer according to latitude, in the North, where only one or two litters are born each season, June is about as early as the young ones ever make their appearance. When first born they are well furred and have their eyes open, by the time they are a week old they are active and pretty well able to look out for their own safety, and at the end of a month or two are weaned and may leave their parents and start out to get a living for themselves. They feed on buffalo grass and weeds of various sorts and the leaves and bark of shrubs and low bushes. In the South where grease-wood and cactus are abundant they fare well; and wherever men cultivate the land, the jack rabbits make themselves at home at once and stuff on garden vegetables, alfalfa and the bark of young orchard trees and so get themselves disliked. In a natural state their numbers are apparently held in check more by scarcity of forage than by the inroads of their enemies, and just as soon as cultivation yields them abundant fodder, they increase to an alarming extent, in spite of the farmers' efforts to destroy them. The eagle, the Western red-tailed hawk, the prairie falcon and the marsh hawk occasionally kill jack rabbits, especially the young ones, but their most destructive foes, next to man, are the wolves and foxes. The coyote is particularly successful in hunting them, and near the border of the woods the gray fox and bob-cat kill them in considerable numbers. In regions where the coyotes have been killed and driven off it has almost invariably followed that the jack rabbits have so multiplied as to prove a much more destructive nuisance than the coyotes had ever been. Occasionally an epidemic reduces their numbers locally, but a very few seasons usually serve to establish them again in their former numbers. During the fall and winter jack rabbits are hunted and killed in great numbers, the most popular method seems to be shooting them from waggons or buckboards with the assistance of dogs who start the jacks from their cover and bring in the game when it is killed. One man will sometimes kill five or six dozen jack-rabbits in a day in this manner. The greatest number, however, are killed in drives, an area several miles in extent is beaten over by men on horseback who close in as they advance, driving the game before them, usually into some kind of enclosure or corral from which there is no escape. The number of rabbits taken in one day in this manner runs from a few hundred up to ten or even twenty thousand. Driving jack rabbits, though on a much smaller scale than just described, seems always to have been a favourite pastime with most tribes of Western Indians. By far the most exhilarating and sportsman-like method of hunting jack rabbits is coursing with greyhounds, in the same manner that coursing has always been followed in the Old World; jack rabbits are if anything swifter and more resourceful in dodging the hounds than are the European hares. The jack rabbits are started from their forms and go off like the wind with the greyhounds in hot pursuit, while the rider follows as closely as he can. The whole thing goes with a swing and dash to the very end, the rabbit dodging, leaping and doubling frantically, until either he has succeeded in reaching the brush and safety, or the greyhound has seized him and both go rolling over and over together along the ground. Although the fur of the jack rabbit seems to be well enough suited for felting it is not much used at present, while the skin is too tender and the fur itself too brittle to make it of much value as fur. The Western Indians, however, have always held jack rabbit skins in high esteem for clothing. They twist the skin in narrow strips which are fastened together to make robes, the skins being twisted in such a way as to leave the fur on both sides making a warm durable robe of exceeding lightness.