The Brown Hare (Lepus europaeus)

This beautiful animal has tawny orange fur flecked with yellow and a soft white belly that provides counter-shading to confuse the eye of the predator. There is a thick downy undercoat and longer coarser hairs on top, equipping it for life exposed to rain, wind and cold. It has very long black-tipped ears and its beautiful eyes are a rich amber that lightens with age. It inhabits arable farmland, meadows, grassland and well-established hedgerows near wood and copse. This gives options for shelter and disguise. Speed and concealment are a hare’s main defence and they can run at up to 45mph.

The machinery, the concreting and disturbance of building a huge pylon line that passes through the Forncetts, as is proposed, threatens the existence of our local hares whose population is in serious decline throughout the UK.

Hares are mainly active at night and usually forage at dusk and dawn. They are herbivores, eating plants and grasses and sometimes bark and twigs, The young ones, born in my garden this summer, liked carrot tops and dill. They are highly selective, preferring wild plants rich in fat, protein and minerals. Like rabbits they re-ingest their nutrient rich droppings in order to get the goodness out of the high cellulose of the grasses.

I recommend a brilliant account of the life of hares in modern Britain for readers who want to know more than I can compress into this article: Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (2024). It is a beautifully observed and precisely written book about the brown hare and the writer’s reconnection to nature.

The complex colouring of hares is linked to the fact that they do not burrow but live entirely above ground, relying on camouflage and concealment to prevent predators detecting them. They make a shallow depression on the surface of earth, leaves or grasses, known as a form, and sit motionless. Leverets in the first four weeks of life freeze instinctively at the approach of machines and are often crushed by agricultural harvesters.

Hares are thought, through radiocarbon dating of ancient bones , to have been introduced to Britain in the iron age and are considered naturalised. George Ewart Evans writes that the hare was a sacred animal dedicated to the white goddess, the Earth Mother, and was taken into battle by Boadicea, Queen of the Norfolk Iceni, as magical protection.

Hares have acute hearing and the lateral position of their eyes gives them a nearly 360 degree field of vision. They have developed complex escape strategies including doubling back on their scent trails and leaping sideways to break them, turning on a sixpence, as old countrymen used to say. They work out ‘meuses’ or gaps in hedges for rapid exits from enclosed fields.

In order to escape from fox, owl, buzzard, stoat or man with a gun and dog, they rely on high speed and endurance. Their athleticism is a joy. Adult hares, when disturbed bound across fields propelling themselves forward with long powerful hind legs, often zig-zagging to confuse the pursuer.

Their power and resilience depends on their light skeleton, including the skull, their large hearts and lungs and their substantial blood supply that helps the oxidation of their muscles through fine capillaries. They have wide nasal passages. Hares can swim and they have been recorded taking to the sea to escape hounds.

Some sources still refer to male hares fighting or boxing in a field but recent observation establishes that it is more likely to be a female warding off amorous males. Females after mating when receptive, and giving birth, may lead a predating fox away from their leverets in a wild chase over the fields. Dalton observed them as playful and devoted to their young.

Although ostensibly protected by the countryside act 1981 and given priority status in the 2010 UK Biodiversity plan the hare is still considered a ‘game species’, the only one in the UK with no protection in the closed season.

It is also listed in agricultural terms as a ‘pest species’ and can be shot with a firearm licence all year on farmland and landed estates, leaving young leverets to starve in the fields if the mother is killed. Hare coursing is illegal since the Hunting Act 2002 but local people assure me it still continues using lurchers usually crossbred from collies and greyhounds.

References:

Chloe Dalton - Raising Hare, 2024

Simon Carnell - Hare, 2009

Wildlife Trusts

 

March 2025