Nature Notes - Hare Day
I wish all those of you who have never seen a hare could have come on yesterday afternoon's dog walk with B&B. It was hare heaven.
We went to my favourite permission*, which includes three meadows beside a stream, a triangular one leading to a square one leading to a long rectangular one - though all shapes are approximate. B&B were wildly excited as soon as we parked up, and were soon less excited when the first 15 minutes involved me chatting to the 'retired' farmer (who was tidying up some dead timber on the wheat stubble). We had a good moan about the state of farming (low yields this year, low wheat prices, increasing vertical integration putting more power into the hands of big companies, clueless government) as B&B got increasingly peed off about the delay. Batshit went so far as to sit down and stare in my general direction.
Finally, we set off down the hill. Brains flushed a pheasant, and was very pleased with herself.
At the end of the hedge, we left the stubble and went onto the square meadow. In the next 25 minutes we saw hare after hare. One running up a track the other side of the stream, one in the rectangular field that ran and then hunkered down, a pair of leverets running hell for leather (and disturbing a covey of partridges in the process), the hunkered one getting up again, another adult flushed by Brains, and a really big one racing off through a hedge.
Having done a circuit of the long field, we went back across the square one. A hare ran off along a hedgeline and reappeared on the stubble 100 yards away. It ran a little further and then stopped to look back at Brains staring at it. A beautiful little rust coloured leveret ran quite casually into the triangular field and lodged herself in the deepest grass she could find. She got up again and Batshit almost... and I called her name and she stopped.
Another one got up, more bothered by a low-flying buzzard than by us, and a final one - massive back legs - loped off in the distance.
I've never seen so many in such a short space of time. Part of me hates to disturb them - which is why I stayed off those fields for a while, to let the leverets grow up a bit - but I also know that almost no one goes down there, so for 99.9% of the time, the hares' lives continue undisturbed. B&B don't chase, either. If they did, I'd avoid the place like the plague.
The tally was one pheasant, half a dozen partridges, a little flock of goldfinches, the buzzard, and ten hares, three of them seen twice. Before I left, I showed the farmer a video I'd taken, of Batshit NOT chasing the hunkered hare the second time it got up.
One day I should go down there at dusk, and tuck myself and a dog into a quiet spot downwind of everything, and just watch.
*A 'permission' is a piece of land to which the landowner has granted you access for a specified activity. In my case, running and training my dogs.