Hare

The European hare, Lepus europaeus, is a large wild hare described by the naturalist Peter Simon Pallas in 1778. In Britain it is usually called the brown hare, and it is the animal most people in Europe picture when they hear the word hare. It belongs to the order Lagomorpha, together with rabbits and pikas, and not to the rodents, even though it also has teeth that never stop growing. Hares are built for open country: long legs, big ears and eyes set high on the sides of the head let them spot danger early and outrun it. The European hare is mostly active at dusk and at night and spends the day pressed flat in a shallow hollow in the ground. A male hare is called a jack or buck, a female a jill or doe, and the young are called leverets. Native to Europe and western Asia, from Spain and Britain to western Siberia and Iran, it was later carried by people to South America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Today it is one of the most widespread wild mammals on the planet, and in some of those new homes it is treated as a pest.

Hares and rabbits belong to the same family, Leporidae, but they are different animals that cannot interbreed: hares have 48 chromosomes and the European rabbit has 44. The easiest difference to see is size and shape. A European hare is clearly bigger, often 3 to 5 kilograms against about 1.5 to 2 for a wild rabbit, with longer legs, a more upright stance and longer ears with black tips. Hares run away at high speed across open ground, while rabbits dash for cover and disappear into a burrow. That points to the second big difference: hares never dig burrows and live above ground all their lives, resting in a shallow form, while rabbits live in groups in underground tunnel systems called warrens. The third difference is in the young. Leverets are born fully furred, with their eyes open, and can move within minutes, while rabbit kittens are born naked, blind and helpless in a nest. Rabbits were domesticated centuries ago and every pet bunny comes from the European rabbit, but hares have never been domesticated. To add to the confusion, the American jackrabbits are true hares, while the Belgian hare is a breed of domestic rabbit.

There are around 30 species of hares, all in the genus Lepus, and they are native to every continent except Antarctica, Australia and South America, where the only hares are the ones people brought. The European hare of this page is one of the largest. The snowshoe hare, also called the varying hare, lives in the forests of Canada and the northern United States; its coat turns white in winter and its huge hind feet work like snowshoes. The mountain hare of Scandinavia, Russia, the Alps and Scotland also turns white in winter, and the Irish hare is a native form of the mountain hare that stays brown all year in Ireland's mild climate. The Arctic hare lives on the tundra of northern Canada and Greenland. In North America, the black tailed and white tailed jackrabbits are hares of the prairies and deserts. Asia has its own species, such as the Indian hare, the Japanese hare, the Korean hare and the Chinese hare, and Africa has the Cape hare and the scrub hare. Several hares meet the European hare at the edges of its range, such as the Iberian hare in Spain and the Italian hare in central and southern Italy and Sicily, and in some areas they interbreed.

The European hare is a big animal for its family. An adult measures about 50 to 75 centimeters from nose to the base of the tail, the tail adds another 7 to 11 centimeters, and the ears are about 10 centimeters long. Most adults weigh 3 to 5 kilograms, and large ones reach 6 or 7, with females usually a little heavier than males. The coat is a grizzled mix of yellowish brown and gray on the back, reddish on the chest and flanks and white on the belly. The tail is black on top and white below, so it flashes when the hare runs. The ears have black tips, one of the best ways to tell it from a rabbit. In winter the coat gets thicker and grayer, but unlike the mountain hare it never turns white. Its large amber eyes sit high on the sides of the head, which gives the hare an almost complete circle of vision, with only a small blind spot right in front of its nose. That is why hares often spot people long before they are seen. Long, powerful hind legs and light bones make it a sprinter, built to cross open fields at great speed.

The European hare is an animal of open country. It is most at home on farmland with a mix of crops, grassland, steppe and field edges, where it can see predators coming and run without obstacles, and it also lives in dunes, open scrub, orchards, the edges of woods and mountain pastures up to about 2,400 meters. Thick forest and very wet ground are avoided. Its native range covers most of Europe, from northern Spain, France and Britain, where it was probably brought by people in ancient times, to Scandinavia's south, the Baltic states and Russia, and east through Turkey, the Caucasus, Syria, Iraq and Iran to western Siberia. In Spain and Italy it shares the land with other native hares, and in the far north the mountain hare takes over. Outside that area it was introduced by people, and the IUCN lists established populations in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, the Falkland Islands, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Northern Ireland, Kazakhstan and a few islands in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Each hare uses a home range of a few dozen hectares in rich farmland and much more where food is scarce, and hares are not territorial, so several can feed in the same field.

Few mammals have been moved around the world as much as the European hare, almost always by hunters who wanted familiar game in new lands. In Argentina it was released in 1888 in Santa Fe province by European settlers, and from there it spread across the Pampas and Patagonia, crossed into Chile and Uruguay, and kept moving north. It entered southern Brazil in the 1950s and has advanced at an estimated 37 to 45 kilometers per year, reaching São Paulo and parts of the Cerrado, while it reached southwestern Bolivia and southeastern Paraguay more slowly. Hares were also released in Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century, and in Canada nine hares brought from Germany escaped from a farm near Brantford, Ontario, in 1912 and spread across the south of the province. In most of these places the hare found open grassland and few competitors, and numbers exploded. Today it is considered an invasive species in much of South America, Australia and New Zealand, where it eats crops, pasture, young trees and native plants. At the same time it has become an important prey for native predators, a game animal and, in Argentina, a source of hare meat exported to Europe.

European hares are herbivores. For most of the year they eat grasses and wild herbs such as clover, dandelion and other low plants, and they are surprisingly choosy, picking the most nutritious leaves and flowers in a field. They also eat crops, especially young cereals, rapeseed, beet and vegetables, which can bring them into conflict with farmers. In winter, when fresh greens are scarce, they turn to winter crops, buds, twigs and the bark of young trees and shrubs, and in cold weather they may gnaw orchard trees. Research in Europe has shown that hares do best in landscapes with many different crops and wild plants, and that the huge single crop fields of modern farming leave them short of good food at some times of year. Hares feed mostly from dusk to dawn, moving from their resting place to feeding grounds that can be a kilometer or more away. Like rabbits, they practice caecotrophy: they produce soft droppings during the day and eat them straight from the body, giving their gut a second chance to take vitamins and protein from tough plant material. They rarely drink, getting most of their water from dew and fresh plants.

Hares do not dig burrows. They spend the day lying in a form, a shallow scrape in the soil, in grass or under a bush, often shaped by the hare's own body and used again and again. Lying flat with the ears pressed along the back, a hare blends so well with the ground that people can almost step on it before it bursts away. This is the hare's main strategy: stay still and trust its camouflage, then, if a predator gets too close, explode into a run. A European hare can reach about 70 kilometers per hour over short distances, and it makes sudden sharp turns that leave foxes and dogs overshooting. It can also leap sideways to break its scent trail before settling into a form, and it is a good swimmer when it has to cross a stream. Its main predators are red foxes, which take many leverets, along with eagles, buzzards, owls, wildcats, lynxes, wolves and stray dogs. Hares are mostly solitary and silent, but they gather loosely in good feeding areas at night, and they communicate with scent, body language and, when caught, a loud scream. In cold weather they may let snow cover them in the form, which keeps them warmer.

In early spring, European hares become much easier to see. Their breeding season starts as early as January, and on bare fields in February and March groups of hares chase each other in circles, leap in the air and stand on their hind legs to box with their front paws. This wild behavior gave rise to the old English phrase mad as a March hare, used long before Lewis Carroll made the March Hare a character of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. For centuries people thought boxing hares were two males fighting over a female. Studies with marked animals showed that most boxing matches are in fact a female fighting off a male that is following her too closely, often before she is ready to mate, and sometimes the fur flies. The female may also be testing how strong and determined the male is. Males do chase and fight each other as well, but less often in this standing boxing way. The best time to watch is at dawn and dusk on short crops or grassland, from a distance, with binoculars. The hare also has a long place in folklore: in German tradition it is the Easter Hare that brings eggs, the origin of the Easter Bunny.

European hares breed for most of the year in their native range, from about January to October, and a female can have three or four litters a year. Pregnancy lasts about 41 to 42 days, and each litter usually has one to four young, called leverets, which weigh around 100 to 130 grams. Female hares can even conceive a new litter in the last days of a pregnancy, something called superfetation that is rare among mammals and lets them squeeze in more litters each season. Leverets are born above ground, in a simple form, fully furred and with their eyes open. Within a day or so they scatter and each hides alone nearby, which lowers the chance that a fox will find the whole litter. The mother stays away to avoid drawing attention, and she comes back only once a day, around sunset, when the leverets gather at the birth site to nurse for a few minutes on very rich milk. They start eating plants at about two to three weeks and are weaned at about four weeks. Many leverets die from predators, cold and wet weather, disease and mowing machines, so a leveret found alone in a field has usually not been abandoned and should be left where it is.

The European hare is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. The latest global assessment, made in June 2018 and published in 2019, notes that the species is still widespread and common across a huge range, but that its population trend is decreasing. Hares remain abundant in parts of central and eastern Europe and in their introduced range in South America, yet in much of western and central Europe numbers have fallen steeply since the 1960s. The main cause is the change in farming. Large fields of a single crop, the loss of hedges, field margins and fallow land, early and frequent mowing, harvesting machines that kill hidden leverets and heavy pesticide use all leave hares with less food and cover. Diseases add pressure, especially European brown hare syndrome, a virus first described in Sweden in the 1980s, and more recently a form of rabbit hemorrhagic disease that also infects hares. Predation by foxes, roads and hunting matter locally. Several countries list the hare as a declining or priority species, and hunters in Germany, France and Austria count hares each spring before setting quotas. Flower strips, wild field margins and later mowing have helped hares recover in some areas.