The Madness of Hares

All hares are born complete with fur and able to see. Hares do not makes burrows, or even nests. Without their fur the leverets would freeze to death, since their mother spreads her new family around in several forms, which she visits during the day. This way, the chances of the whole brood being killed by foxes or stoats are diminished. Many leverets are taken by human beings in the mistaken belief that they have been abandoned, though this is most unlikely.

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If you see a leveret alone in a form, leave it alone, since its mother is almost certainly waiting nearby for you to leave. There are two types of British hare, commonly called the brown and the blue.

The brown hare is the more common, and is found in most areas of Britain, apart from mountainous districts. Its coat is sandy-brown on the upper part, turning to white underneath. An adult weighs between three and five kilos. The blue hare, often called the mountain hare, is much smaller, weighing a little under three kilos. It is also one of the few British mammals to change its coat in winter. Its normal colour is a greyish blue with some brown, but at the autumn moult its coat changes to white. Hares are somewhat solitary creatures, preferring isolation to the large populations that rabbits achieve in their warrens.

Mad as a March hare

And although the female is known to become pregnant at any time of the year, mating normally takes place in the spring. Thanks to its breeding habits, the rabbit is far more numerous in Britain than the hare. The young, up to six at a time, are born into the security of a fur-lined burrow after a gestation of 28 days. And within 24 hours, the mother is ready to conceive again. This phenomenal ability to reproduce is normally kept in check by populations of predators — foxes, stoats, weasels and birds of prey.

In the absence of these, rabbits can overrun even an entire continent, as happened in Australia. Rabbits are extremely timid — they have to be, because they are virtually defenceless. They come out to feed in early morning or in the early evening, straying no farther from the warren than is absolutely necessary.

They are constantly on the look-out for danger. If one senses trouble, it thumps its hind legs on the ground and the rest of the rabbits scamper back to safety. One rabbit nibbling at a patch of grass is one thing, but thousands ruining entire crops is another. By the s, rabbits had become such a pest in Australia that the disease of myxomatosis was introduced to control them.

Nevertheless, the distribution of food affects these benefits. When food is well-spaced, all hares are able to access it. When food is clumped together, only dominant hares can access it. In small gatherings, dominants are more successful in defending food, but as more individuals join in, they must spend more time driving off others.

The larger the group, the less time dominant individuals have in which to eat. Meanwhile, the subordinates can access the food while the dominants are distracted. As such, when in groups, all individuals fare worse when food is clumped as opposed to when it is widely spaced.

European hares have a prolonged breeding season which lasts from January to August. After this hiatus, the size and activity of the males' testes increase, signalling the start of a new reproductive cycle. This continues through December, January and February when the reproductive tract gains back its functionality. Matings start before ovulation occurs and the first pregnancies of the year often result in a single foetus , with pregnancy failures being common. Peak reproductive activity occurs in March and April, when all females may be pregnant, the majority with three or more foetuses.

The mating system of the hare has been described as both polygynous single males mating with multiple females and promiscuous. In addition to dominant animals subduing subordinates, the female fights off her numerous suitors if she is not ready to mate. Fights can be vicious and can leave numerous scars on the ears.

1. Reproduction and "march madness" in the brown hare, lepus europaeus. - Semantic Scholar.
2. Sincronismo Creativo Catalogo Opere 2013 (Italian Edition).
3. more on this story.

When only the fittest male remains, the female stops and allows him to copulate. Litter sizes decrease as the breeding season draws to a close with no pregnancies occurring after August. The testes of males begin to regress and sperm production ends in September. Does give birth in hollow depressions in the ground. An individual female may have three litters in a year with a to day gestation period. The young have an average weigh of around grams 4. Their mother visits them for nursing soon after sunset; the young suckle for around five minutes, urinating while they do so, with the doe licking up the fluid.

She then leaps away so as not to leave an olfactory trail, and the leverets disperse once more. European hares are large leporids and adults can only be tackled by large predators such as canids , felids and the largest birds of prey. European hares have both external and internal parasites. They were also found to host rabbit fleas Spilopsyllus cuniculi , stickfast fleas Echidnophaga myrmecobii , lice Haemodipsus setoni and H. European brown hare syndrome EBHS is a disease caused by a calicivirus similar to that causing rabbit haemorrhagic disease RHS and can similarly be fatal, but cross infection between the two mammal species does not occur.

In October , it was reported that a mutated form of the myxomatosis virus may have jumped to hares in the UK. Normally rare in hares, a significant die-off from the virus has also occurred in Spain. In Europe, the hare has been a symbol of sex and fertility since at least Ancient Greece. The Greeks associated it with the gods Dionysus , Aphrodite and Artemis as well as with satyrs and cupids. The Christian Church connected the hare with lustfulness and homosexuality, but also associated it with the persecution of the church because of the way it was commonly hunted.

In Northern Europe, Easter imagery often involves hares or rabbits. Billson cites folk customs involving the hare around Easter in Northern Europe, and argues that the hare was probably a sacred animal in prehistoric Britain's festival of springtime. John Andrew Boyle cites an etymology dictionary by A. Boyle adds that "when the authors speak of the hare as the 'companion of Aphrodite and of satyrs and cupids' and 'in the Middle Ages [the hare] appears beside the figure of [mythological] Luxuria', they are on much surer ground. The hare is a character in some fables, such as The Tortoise and the Hare of Aesop.

Across Europe, over five million European hares are shot each year, making it probably the most important game mammal on the continent. This popularity has threatened regional varieties such as those of France and Denmark, through large-scale importing of hares from Eastern European countries such as Hungary. In beagling, the hare is hunted with a pack of small hunting dogs, beagles , followed by the human hunters on foot. In Britain, the Hunting Act banned hunting of hares with dogs, so the 60 beagle packs now use artificial "trails", or may legally continue to hunt rabbits.

Hare is traditionally cooked by jugging: It is traditionally served with or briefly cooked with the hare's blood and port wine. Young hares can be roasted; the meat of older hares becomes too tough for roasting, and may be slow-cooked. The European hare has a wide range across Europe and western Asia and has been introduced to a number of other countries around the globe, often as a game species. In general it is considered moderately abundant in its native range, [13] but declines in populations have been noted in many areas since the s. These have been associated with the intensification of agricultural practices.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has evaluated the European hare's conservation status as being of least concern. However, at low population densities, hares are vulnerable to local extinctions as the available gene pool declines, making inbreeding more likely. This is the case in northern Spain and in Greece, where the restocking by hares brought from outside the region has been identified as a threat to regional gene pools. To counteract this, a captive breeding program has been implemented in Spain, and the relocation of some individuals from one location to another has increased genetic variety.

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Mark Goacher Green Politics : Nature Notes 2: The Madness of the March Hare

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