\u201cJust seen a gorgeous hare and thought of you. They\u2019ve had an unbelievable breeding season.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like most farmers, my friend Richard is always busy and often exasperated. But he\u2019s also refreshingly cognisant of his privilege and determined not to blow the opportunity to make a difference. Nature is always part of his management, and now and then I get a message sharing a wildlife update and take it as a cue to visit.<\/p>\n
The fields here are mostly small and rolling. There are ponds and wet scrapes, woodlands and huge hedges with worlds inside them. The margins are wide, and hard-to-cultivate corners are given over to scruffy wildflower mixes for birds and pollinators. There is always cover, always food. I follow one busy, buzzy margin after another. All are humming with insect life: grasshoppers, crickets, hoverflies and bees, butterflies and beetles, and riddled with the tunnels of field voles, the trails and scats of badgers and flat ovals where deer and hares have lain.<\/p>\n
I follow one of the larger trails on\u00a0all fours through a hedge into a field of bright gold wheat stubble, and as I emerge a roe doe breaks cover and bounds lightly into the open, red as a fox in her thin summer coat. And then I see the hares, a dozen or so, dark against the gold. The deer has alerted them to my presence and they sit tall, braced against the earth.<\/p>\n
I use the standoff to study the nearest through binoculars and think, not for the first time, that there is something uncompromising about a hare. Partly it\u2019s the extraordinary ripped physique, but mainly it\u2019s that all\u2011seeing eye \u2013 dark-lined, furious, like that of an Egyptian god: sovereign, unknowable, inalienable. The whole creature is a\u00a0hieroglyph that resists decoding. Even the rough-and-ready folk names for the hare don\u2019t seem to stick \u2013 is that why there are so many?<\/p>\n
Of course, these are among the most persecuted of our wild mammals. The despicable \u201csport\u201d of coursing is booming under the influence of international organised\u00a0crime, but these small gods don\u2019t know it, and when they do move, it\u2019s at an unflustered lope rather than a run. They know\u00a0exactly where they are going,\u00a0and this is a landscape where\u00a0they have options.<\/p>\n