March Hare

The Waterside Natural History Society (WNHS) decided to visit Cheesefoot head the week before Easter to find Hares and hopefully see them boxing in their spring display.

Easter is calculated as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

The vernal equinox is on March the 21stand Easter day is on March the 23rd this year.

Those gardeners who like to plant their potatoes by the full moon but don’t know when it occurs will have no excuse this year as by the definition of Easter it must lie between the 21st and 23rd of March.

Cheesefoot head is located to the East of Winchester and is an area of rolling downland or rolling farmland as it has become.

The name Cheesefoot is a strange one but there is some indication that ‘Old Cheesefoot’ is an old English name for the Devil.

Cheesefoot

Identifying Hares can sometimes be difficult. When seen in a field they can be confused with lumps of soil or indeed rabbits.

Lumps of soil can be eliminated by looking for a length of time and if they don’t move then the chances are it is a lump of soil.

They are different to rabbits in having longer ears and longer hind legs but if lying down the main identifying features are the black tips to the ears and the chestnut colour.

Rabbits tend to stay close to field boundaries whereas hares are seen in the middle of the field at this time of year.

The traditional Easter bunny may have been a hare and still is in some countries. They were once thought to lay eggs because of their use of a scrape in the ground as a nest and their close proximity to plovers nests which could be another association with Easter.

Hares are normally shy creatures but at this time of year they emerge in to the open for the traditional spring frenzy or boxing.

The reason for this is competition between males to attain dominance over the females although it is usually a female hitting a male presumably as a means of rejecting the wimps.

Groups of hares are known as a ‘drove’ but are solitary creatures at most times of the year.

Did we see any hares on our visit? Well yes and no. No because the meeting was cancelled due to bad weather and yes because my wife and myself went the next day to see what we had missed and we did indeed see hares.

We walked for some time over the downland to the south of Cheesefoot head without seeing any hares but the sounds of the skylarks singing and the lapwings calling made up for any disappointment.

Walking over downland has the advantage that you can see a long way in the distance and we did see two hares running across a field over a mile away.

Whilst walking along a footpath at the side of the model airplane field we were surprised to see a hare jump on to the path not twenty yards in front. If it was as surprised at seeing us it did not take long to recover and quickly sped off down the track.

That was not the last sighting, though, as when we looked in to the field on our left we saw a hare running towards us which stopped only a few yards away before again running off.

This time I was ready with my camera and took several shots marred only by a piece of hedge obscuring the view.

During our walk we saw two men with a large hawk training it to hunt and paradoxically two roe deer in the next field both of which seemed not to notice each other.

A further sign that spring is on its way was the goodly number of violets in flower. We saw an area of early dog violets almost burgundy in colour and further along an area of early dog violets pale blue.

Further still we came across a patch of sweet violets pure white in colour which my wife said smelled very sweet.

Our next outdoor meeting will be on 20th April when we will be going to Holly Hill woods looking for flowers and birds. Meet at 10am at Oak road car park Dibden Purlieu.

Our next indoor meeting will be on 31st March in St Andrews Centre Dibden Purlieu at 7.30pm when Dick Jones will give a talk on spiders.

Visitors are always welcome to any of our meetings.

For more information contact the secretary on Tel 023 8089 3803.

Any comments on this article welcomed to mharrison67@btinternet.com