Yarkand Hare

1 Yarkand Hare Breed Overview

The Yarkand Hare is a wild hare living in the Tarim Basin of China. Small in size but with huge ears, years of neglect and heavy hunting have made it an endangered protected animal.

Chinese name: Yarkand Hare

Chinese aliases: Southern Xinjiang hare, Shache hare

English name: Yarkand Hare

Binomial name: Yarkandensis (Günther, 1875)

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Subphylum: Vertebrata

Class: Mammalia

Order: Lagomorpha

Family: Leporidae

Genus: Lepus

Distribution: The Yarkand Hare has no subspecies and is endemic to China, distributed in the Tarim Basin and Lop Nur region of Xinjiang. Its range is nearly ring-shaped, including Aksu, Ruoqiang, Milan, Alagan, Yuli, Korla, Bachu, Qiemo, Shache, Hotan, and Kashgar.

Endangerment: The Yarkand Hare’s fur can be made into textiles and its meat eaten; since the 1960s its numbers have generally declined in some areas, especially near towns and cities where it has almost disappeared.

Conservation status: IUCN Red List: LR/nt (Lower Risk/Near Threatened); effective 2003. China Red Data Book: Vulnerable; effective 1996.

2 Physical Characteristics of the Yarkand Hare

Also called the Southern Xinjiang hare or Shache hare, the Yarkand Hare is small with light fur. Body length 29–43 cm, tail 6–11 cm, weight 1.2–1.6 kg. Its ears are large and the ear tips are not black—the clearest difference from the snow hare. Its fur is short and straight; in summer the back is sandy brown with fine gray-black flecks, the sides sandy yellow, and the chin, throat, and belly white.

3 Yarkand Hare Care Tips

The main reasons for the wild hare’s yearly decline are rapid population growth, increasing farmland and traffic, and frequent hunting. Compared with the past, Yarkand Hares are now rare within 5–10 km of almost every city or county in southern Xinjiang. Also, its narrow habitat and range mean human disturbance and habitat destruction pose a direct threat to its survival.

4 Yarkand Hare Living Environment

The Yarkand Hare lives in the Tarim Basin, an ancient species. We often use “living fossil” for an ancient species, and indeed its appearance reveals patterns that prove environmental change.

The Yarkand Hare is endemic to the Tarim Basin and a remnant of the Tarim landmass. After the Himalayas rose, the Kunlun, Altai, and Qilian mountains uplifteds sharply, and as the Eurasian landmass joined, its area grew, blocking the Indian Ocean monsoon and making the Tarim Basin increasingly arid. Per Corbet (1979), enlarged auditory bullae are a morphological adaptation to arid environments, and the Yarkand Hare indeed shows this—large bullae, relatively longer ears, and sandy-yellow fur. Ecologically, the open arid landscape offers little cover from predators, so keen hearing is understandable. The enlarged bullae are a new trait after the change.

However, its deep, V-shaped upper incisor groove filled with enamel is not something formed in a short evolutionary time. Typical Palearctic species of China—the snow hare, Manchurian hare, Amur black hare, and cape hare, and the South China hare—lack such grooves. Species with such grooves, like China’s Hainan hare and Yunnan hare and India’s hispid hare and black-naped hare, are typical Oriental-realmspecies. From earth history, after the Himalayas rose and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau uplifted, the Yarkand Hare was cut off from the Oriental realm. Evolutionarily, its upper incisor groove is an ancestral trait, showing kinship with Oriental-realm species. Thus, though in the Palearctic, the Yarkand Hare is an Oriental-realm element within it.

If you cannot change the environment, adapt to it—the result of nature’s survival of the fittest. The rabbit’s evolution and change are inseparable from the environment; different environments create nature’s rich diversity. Perhaps this is what is called a miraculous craftsmanship.

5 Yarkand Hare Feeding Guidelines

The Yarkand Hare is a typical herbivore. One may wonder, in such a resource-scarce place, where do plants come from for it to eat? Sometimes, to stave off hunger, it selectively gnaws bark.

The Yarkand Hare is endemic only to the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang. An adult weighs 1.9 kg, is 43 cm long, with a short 8 cm tail and a distinctly large pair of ears a quarter of its body length. Forelegs short, hind legs long and strong, suited to leaping. Head, back, and body fur are sandy brown; sides sandy yellow; belly white. A typical plains-desert animal, it is common among Populus euphratica and Tamarix dunes, feeding on reeds and desert plants, breeding 2–3 times a year with 3–5 kits per litter.

A typical desert-species hare, it inhabits the Tarim Basin at 900–1,200 m near rivers and Lop Nur, in Populus euphratica and Tamarix forests along riverbanks, in semi-desert steppe around the Taklamakan Desert, and in Tarim River flood areas. It is generally active at dawn and dusk, with some seasonal variation.

In winter, to avoid predators, it forages only before dawn and after dusk, mostly in soft sandy dunes with Tamarix, digging up roots of reeds, Apocynum, licorice, and Alhagi. By day it hides under shrubs. In summer it is often active by day too, gathering at rivers to drink, favoring the bark, young twigs, and green grass of shrubs and half-shrubs.