Kids t-shirt
This kids' hare t-shirt features Olwen, a countryside hare with long ears and a calm gaze, from my Animal Kinhood series. A countryside critter with a friendly face, the kind a child adopts as their own straight away.
Photo: Stuart Bartlett / UnsplashLepus europaeus
A well-laid hedge holds for thirty winters. Hurry doesn't hold for one.
Open fields, grasslands and farmland of continental Europe and Great Britain, almost always bordered by hedges, field boundaries and small copses it uses as daytime cover. It also adapts to moorland, salt marshes, airfields and mountain areas up to 2,800 meters in altitude.
Here's the hare fact that grabs kids the most: baby hares aren't born in an underground burrow like rabbit kits, but right at ground level, in a simple hollow in the grass called a "form". And they're born already furred and with their eyes open, ready to run almost from day one. No nest, no burrow: the hare comes into the world ready for the open field.
A hare is fast, with long hind legs built for the countryside, and that alert look tends to appeal to a child: a real animal, not a cartoon. The plum herringbone waistcoat Olwen wears was given to her by an older friend from the valley and sits a little big through the shoulders, a detail kids find funny. If they want to get to know her fully, Olwen is in her biography; for the t-shirt it's enough that they decide this hare is theirs. Every portrait is signed by me, Yago Partal.
