Normally I wouldn’t do back-to-back posts, but we had our first real snow this weekend, so I took advantage of the situation to snap up some pics of a figure that in real life would be at home in such an environment: the Arctic hare, Lepus arcticus. This figure was produced by Safari Ltd. in 2017 for their North American Wildlife line.
The Arctic hare is a large lagomorph that lives in the northernmost regions of North America. Populations in Newfoundland and Labrador have a brown coat in the summer and the characteristic white coat in the winter, but in extreme northern Canada where the summers are short, the hare is white all year long. The Arctic hare needs to be able to blend in with its background, as there is a wide range of predators that hunt it, including Arctic and red foxes, Arctic wolves, snowy owls, ermines, falcons, and hawks.
This figure is 5.5 cm long, making it approximately 1:10 on average. The fur is sculpted with incredible detail. It is painted dirty white, with black accents on the claws, nose, mouth, and characteristic ear tips, fading into gray inner ears. The eyes are yellow with black outline and pupil. The dirtying of the white coat with some gray was a nice touch, so as not to appear pristine and pure white.
The proportions are near perfect, with a short, thick body and shorter ears. Other figures of this species (such as those by Papo and Nayab) have longer ears which is more suggestive of the winter form of the European hare (L. europaeus).
In my opinion this is the one of the best, if not the best, representative of this species currently available, and comes recommended to anyone whose collection parameters it falls within. Time to wrap this post up, as our little friend here needs to get hopping before someone else gets chomping:
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Wonderful, just what I was needing. Actually I miss an Arctic hare in my collection and I hadn’t decided between this one and the Papo counterpart. Your observations seem intringuing to me and they help me to tend to the Safari version.
Most leoporid figures have an inherent tendency to look cute and cuddly, but this one manages to project an image of toughness.