European hare

• 1. Introduction

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  The European hare, Lepus europaeus, can reach 70 kilometres per hour in full flight across an open field. That speed is not incidental to its existence. It is, quite literally, the reason the animal is still here. With no burrow to retreat to, no armour, and no venom, the hare has staked everything on its legs, its lungs, and its alertness. Yet for all its wariness, once every spring something strange happens. The normally nocturnal animal comes out in broad daylight, sprinting across fields and throwing punches at rivals in plain sight of anyone watching. That spectacle gave English the phrase "mad as a March hare" and puzzled naturalists for centuries, because the boxing matches, it turns out, are not what anyone assumed. How does an animal built for solitude become a symbol of springtime frenzy? And how has a creature so abundant in ancient Europe become worryingly scarce in much of it today? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Anatomy of Speed

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  At 55 to 65 centimetres from head to body, the European hare is the largest hare native to Europe, and its body reflects a single overriding purpose: sustained endurance running in open terrain. Its hind feet measure between 14 and 16 centimetres and its ears stretch 9.4 to 11 centimetres from notch to tip. Those ears are more than sensory equipment; lowered ears warn other hares to keep their distance, raised ears signal interest, and a thump of the front feet issues a challenge. The animal weighs 3.5 to 5 kilograms, and behind that modest mass lies a cardiovascular system that puts the European rabbit to shame. Wider nostrils and a proportionally larger heart allow the hare to sustain high-speed flight rather than just a short dash. The European rabbit, by contrast, is built for quick sprints through vegetated cover. The hare trades shelter for stamina. Its dark limb musculature sits on a frame that is visibly slimmer than that of the rabbit. Even its digestive system is calibrated for this lean, fast life: compared to the rabbit, food passes through the hare's gut more rapidly. It also eats its own faeces on occasion, recovering proteins and vitamins that a first pass through the gut left behind. Two or three hares, foraging steadily, can consume the equivalent of a single sheep.

• 3. Where Hares Live

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  The European hare's native range spans much of continental Europe, reaching as far north as 60 degrees latitude and extending east into Central Asia, with the range pushing into Siberia in recent decades. Its preference is for open, temperate ground, particularly mixed farmland, though it thrives best in warm and dry districts with mild winters, according to research in the Czech Republic. That study also found hares most numerous at elevations below 200 metres above sea level, where average annual temperatures hover around 10 degrees Celsius. In their native steppe habitat, populations thin out to roughly 2 individuals per 100 hectares. In milder climates the same species can pack as many as 275 hares into the same area. The hare is not thought to have reached Great Britain naturally. Its arrival there may date to somewhere between 500 and 300 BCE, suggesting a human hand in the crossing. It was introduced more deliberately and more recently to North America, where populations established themselves in Ontario and New York State, though attempts to settle it in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticut did not take hold. In the Southern Cone of South America it found more hospitable ground: populations now exist in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, as well as the Falkland Islands. Australia and both islands of New Zealand also received it. Despite this global spread, the species keeps to open fields and scattered vegetation, relying on hedges, ditches, and permanent cover areas to supply the variety of food it needs. Foxes become a particular problem wherever forest edges are present, because those edges give predators useful cover that can push hare density down.

• 4. A Year of Eating

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  Spring and summer bring the European hare a comparatively generous menu. During those warmer months it grazes on soy, clover, corn poppy, wild grasses, and herbs. The preference is always for high-energy fats and proteins over dietary fibre, and the hare will avoid cereal crops whenever more attractive alternatives are within reach. As autumn arrives the diet shifts. Winter wheat becomes the primary choice, and hunters have long exploited the hare's palate, luring them with piles of sugar beet and carrots. When grasses and herbs disappear entirely, the hare turns to woody material: shrubs and the bark of young fruit trees. Stripping bark is not random destruction. The hare is after the vascular tissue just beneath it, feeding on the soluble carbohydrates stored there. Despite this dietary flexibility, the hare is not a solitary feeder by inclination. European hares forage in groups, and group feeding carries a measurable benefit: when multiple pairs of eyes are scanning for predators, each individual can spend more time with its head down eating. The advantage is real but unevenly distributed. When food is spread out, every member of the group can reach it. When food is concentrated, dominant animals control access and must spend more and more time chasing off rivals as the group grows. Subordinate individuals exploit those distractions. The result is that the larger the group and the more concentrated the food, the worse even the dominant animal fares. The hare's social arithmetic punishes monopoly.

• 5. March Madness

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  The breeding season of the European hare runs from January all the way through August. Males, known as bucks, are fertile for most of this span, with only October and November representing genuine reproductive downtime. After that low, the testes enlarge again through December, January, and February, readying the animal for what follows. Peak activity arrives in March and April, when all females may be simultaneously pregnant, the majority carrying three or more foetuses. The mating system has been described as both polygynous and promiscuous. Females are receptive for only a few hours within each six-week reproductive cycle, so competition among local bucks is intense. The normally nocturnal bucks are forced out into daylight to find does, giving observers the spectacle that generated the phrase "March madness". For centuries the boxing seen in these encounters was assumed to be male-versus-male competition. It is not, or at least not primarily. Females hit males to signal that they are not yet ready to mate, or to test a suitor's resolve. Fights leave real marks: scars on the ears document the violence of these encounters. When a doe is ready, she does not simply accept the nearest male. She runs, and the males in pursuit must prove their stamina over distance. She stops only when a single male remains. Litter sizes shift across the season. The earliest pregnancies of the year, starting in January, often produce only a single foetus, and miscarriages are common early on. Litter sizes increase toward the peak months and then fall again as August approaches, after which no females remain pregnant. The testes of males shrink by September, and sperm production ends entirely the following month.

• 6. Raising Leverets

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  Does give birth in shallow depressions they dig in the ground. A single female may produce two to four litters in a year, after a gestation period of around six weeks. One litter can contain as many as ten young, known as leverets, each weighing an average of about 130 grams at birth. The leveret is born fully furred and precocial, capable of leaving the nest almost immediately. This early independence is not accidental. Born in an exposed depression rather than a sheltered burrow, a leveret that stayed still in one place would be easy prey. Instead, the young disperse during the day and reconvene near their birthplace in the evening. Their mother arrives after sunset for a nursing visit. The young suckle for about five minutes, urinating during the feed, while the doe licks up the fluid. When the nursing is finished she leaps away, deliberately avoiding a scent trail that a predator might follow. The leverets then separate again until the following evening. Young hares can eat solid food after two weeks and are fully weaned by three to four weeks of age. The name for these juveniles, leveret, was first recorded in written English in the 1500s. The name for adult females, doe, came into use later, in the 17th century. Young of both sexes explore their surroundings, but males tend to range farther from where they were born. Sexual maturity arrives between four and eight months of age, and a hare can live for as long as eight to thirteen years.

• 7. Predators and Disease

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  In Poland, research found that foxes cause up to 50 percent of adult hare mortality, with fox predation peaking in spring when small prey such as rodents are scarce. At that time of year, hares can constitute as much as 50 percent of the biomass in a fox's diet. The relationship runs in both directions. When sarcoptic mange swept through red fox populations in Scandinavia, hare numbers climbed noticeably, then fell again once fox populations recovered. Birds of prey extend the predator list upward. Goshawks and sparrowhawks can take adult hares; crows and ravens target the young. In the Alps, the Carpathians, the Apennines, and northern Spain, the golden eagle hunts the European hare. In North America, where the species was introduced, foxes and coyotes prey on it, with bobcats and Canada lynxes taking some as well. Disease adds another layer of pressure. One study in Slovakia found that 54 percent of hares were parasitised by nematodes and more than 90 percent by coccidia. The hare also hosts several flea species, lice, and mites. European brown hare syndrome, caused by a calicivirus, is a distinct disease from rabbit haemorrhagic disease, and the two host species appear to be mutually immune to each other's virus. In October 2018, a mutated form of the rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus, RHDV2, was reported to have infected hares in the United Kingdom, where the disease is normally rare in this species. A significant die-off from the same virus also occurred in Spain around the same period.

• 8. Hares in Culture and Crisis

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  In ancient Greece, the hare was associated with Dionysus, Aphrodite, and Artemis, as well as with satyrs and cupids. The Christian Church later linked the animal to lustfulness and to the persecution of the church, connecting both associations to the ways in which hares were hunted. In Northern Europe the hare became entangled with Easter traditions. The 19th-century scholar Charles Isaac Elton pointed to folk customs in Leicestershire, England, where profits from land called Harecrop Leys funded a meal thrown on the ground at a place called the Hare-pie Bank, and suggested a possible connection to the worship of the goddess Ēostre. The scholar John Andrew Boyle challenged that link, noting that almost nothing is actually known about Ēostre and that the hare is not associated with the Norse goddess Freyja, with whom Ēostre had been identified. Boyle considered the hare's connections to Aphrodite and to the medieval figure of Luxuria far more solidly grounded. The German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer depicted a hare with close observation in his 1502 watercolour painting Young Hare. Lewis Carroll placed the March Hare at a tea party with the Hatter in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The phrase "mad as a March hare" itself traces back to the sixteenth century, appearing in the writings of John Skelton and Sir Thomas More. Today the pressures on the hare are more material than symbolic. Over five million European hares are shot by hunters across the continent each year. Populations have been declining in mainland Europe since the 1960s, driven by intensified agriculture, climate change, and increased predation. In France, Spain, and Greece, importing hares from Eastern European countries such as Hungary has threatened the genetic distinctiveness of regional populations. Spain has launched a captive breeding program in response, and targeted relocations have increased genetic variety in some areas. The Bern Convention lists the European hare under Appendix III as a protected species. Norway, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have all placed it on their national Red Lists as near threatened or threatened, even as it remains classified globally as a species of least concern.