HARING AROUND

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In her latest Land Rover column, Helena Douglas patiently awaits a glimpse of a hare ...

Special to MORE INTELLGENT LIFE

We have been waiting in the Land Rover, cameras poised, for 25 minutes. Apart from the gentle swaying of long grass and a white cloud lazily rolling overhead everything is still. The stubble field in front of me glows golden in the warm light of the lowering evening sun, young thistles gleam green and lush at its edge. Other than the occasional caw of crows in the trees the countryside of this estate in East Anglia is quiet.

Then, just as my mind begins to wander, my friend, the estate’s head gamekeeper, leans forward and slowly points towards some patchy thistles about 50 metres away. Behind the spiky green clump is what looks like a clod of brown earth. As I raise my camera and focus the lens, the blurry image sharpens and suddenly the clod has a glinting golden eye, soft tawny fur and two long ears held flat against its neck. It is what we have been waiting for: a brown hare (Lepus europaeus), crouched close to the ground.

As we continue to watch in silence the creature slowly raises itself into a crouch. I will it to sit up and reward us with a glimpse of its delicate ears pointing skywards in the classic, fully alert pose. Then there it is, tall, proud, and looking, so it seems, directly at me. Our motor-drives whirr and the hare sits still and steady. Then, without warning it is off, sprinting, its gait long-limbed and big-bounding, to the edge of the field where it leaps through grasses and flowers before disappearing into a scrubby hedge. I sit quietly, stunned by the beauty and speed of this mysterious creature that has long mesmerised man and has now cast its spell over me.

Hares are found worldwide, except in Antarctica and some ocean islands, and live in almost every climate. While it is thought that the Romans introduced brown hares into Britain, possibly for coursing, they have long featured in mythology. They were mentioned by the Greeks, Persians and Egyptians; were sacred to English heathens and played an important part in pagan celebrations to welcome the spring (because of this association English Christians ostracised them, replacing them with a rabbit at Easter). The Saxons worshipped a hare goddess and, in the 12th century, the animals were thought to turn into witches and back again at will.

Samuel Pepys, the diarist, carried a hare’s foot in his pocket as a cure for colic; hares are mentioned in the works of Shakespeare, Yeats and Kingsley; and William Cowper, the poet, kept one as a pet. Artists and sculptors have often been fascinated by hares: Albrecht Durer’s 1502 watercolour of a brown hare brilliantly captures the essence of the animal, while modern-day sculptors such as Paul Jenkins and Michael Simpson use bronze to portray the grace and speed of these animals that can run at up to 45 miles per hour.

Brown hares not only move fast but breed quickly too; females can produce three or four litters of three or more leverets each year. But despite this, Britain’s brown hare population is under threat. Numbers have declined by 75% since the second world war, mostly due to modern farming practices which have destroyed their habitat and predation by foxes and birds of prey. As a result, in 1995 hares were listed under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan which, through a number of measures, hoped to more than double Britain's brown hare population to 2m by 2010. Sadly this target has not yet been achieved. The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust estimates the current population of brown hares to be around 800,000 and rising gradually. It notes that in some areas of the country hares are thriving, but in others they are dropping.

My friend explains that on this 10,000-acre estate, 400 acres of the 2,000 farmed by the owner (the rest is managed by tenant farmers) are given over to the provision of conservation habitat for endangered species such as hares and English partridges. Thirty miles of 12-metre-wide grass headlands have been planted at the edges of the estate’s arable fields; the mix of pollen- and nectar-generating grasses, chicory, canary grass and yellow clover provide food for hares in the summer and shelter in the winter. Some fields are left ”cultivated fallow”—ie, ploughed and unplanted—for hares who like to hide in the ridges of earth. Two hundred acres of wild bird-seed mix (including kale, red and white millet, linseed, mustard and fodder radish) have been planted for songbirds, partridges and hares to feed on. This intense, complex and time-consuming management of the land, combined with predator control, provides a year-round habitat in which threatened wildlife can thrive.

I look at the field margin stretching alongside us in a new light: insects abound in a four-metre strip of yarrow, ox-eye daisies and bird’s-foot trefoil which glow yellow amid the soft fescue grasses waving in the breeze. Blue chicory mixed with yellow clover and lucerne is grown as cover for overwintering hares and game birds, and an exposed mown area allows birds to dry out after rain or on a dewy morning. Finally, tussocky grass is there as an overwintering habitat for insects and the perfect home for ground nesting birds.

As the veil of dusk slips over the treeline it is time to leave the wildlife to itself. The grunty chug of the Land Rover engine wakes me from my reverie and we bump slowly along the field edge in companionable silence. Pausing by a gateway onto another stubble field, we both look and smile. There, in the last of the day’s sun, six hares sit upright in the field, beginning their day just as we are ending ours.

More information about conserving the brown hare can be found on the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust Website: www.gwct.org.uk

Helena Douglas is a writer based in West Sussex. The pictures here are hers. Her last Land Rover column described an amble in the West Sussex Weald.