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With the thick snow cover the winter diet of the brown hare is shoots of trees, buds and bark. Aspen, willow, rowan, birches at forest edges – but damage is done in orchards. The snow carries a hare, getting over fences from the high snowdrifts is the easiest thing in the world, and they start  moving about in shelter of the evening dusk. 

You look and ponder:  why is it that mostly just a few younger fruit tree have  the bark on their trunks so thoroughly chewed, with serious damage to the tree? All animals need water for their digestion and a fruit tree that stands above a water vein has in spite of the winter a much better water supply and so is much juicier – that is one possible explanation, but the doings of hares are often unpredictable.

 

Brown hares eat their food twice because they have a simply constructed stomach and in order to extract the nutrients fully they  have become in part  coprophags. The first loose stools are eaten again and after the second round of  digestion the familiar hare droppings are excreted.

 

Our brown hares have no shortage of enemies, among predators as well as birds of prey that can cope with adult hares weighing three to seven kilos. But  hares are fast and skilled and know their territory and its shelters inside and out. Because of this the average life length of the prodigiously reproducing brown hares isn’t particularly short after all, estimated to be 6 years. The population is more than 40 000 pairs.