Nothing to do with birds this time. Well not much anyway. On a very dull, blustery and wet day we went for a hare walk at Welney in the Fens. I've been there loads of times, mostly for the Winter swans and most recently for the pallid harrier. A few weeks ago I saw they were advertising hare walks. This gives you the chance to go off-piste on the reserve and get close to some of the many hares in the fields. That is the thing about Welney - you are really restricted to the path and many hides along it. They look out onto the flood where the waterfowl are, but you cannot go out into the fields. The chance to get out was too good miss so we signed up (it's free for members!!).
We got to the reserve with just enough time to have a quick cuppa in the cafe before meeting our guide at 2pm. There was only us, two others and two guides from the WWT. With the clouds rolling in and looking very threatening we made sure we had our wet weather gear on and followed our guide out onto Lady Fen. This is barely 100 yards from the main centre but was behind a large electrified fence to keep out foxes. They are an issue with the ground-nesting waders in the Summer.
The plan seemed to be quite simple. Walk across the slightly flooded fields and see if anything pops up! Well, we didn't have to wait long. We had gone no more than 50 years into the field when a brown shape lifted up out of the grass and scurried away from us.
Hares can run at over 40mph when they put a shift on. This one was only just strolling though and quite soon dropped down out of sight. Carrying on with our walk we then saw another hare crouched down by a line of reeds. It was pretty flattened but you could see its ears poking up! As our guide approached the hare it realised we had seen it and scampered off. Fortunately it scampered right towards me!
It must have been no more than 30 yards away when it banked off and headed towards one of the ditches and out of sight. A tricky photographic exercise to track it considering it was almost dark now. The rain clouds were rolling in and I had to use the ISO up to a few thousand. Trying to freeze an animal moving at 40mph gets a bit awkward at this point so I'm not too displeased with the outcome.
As we carried on we saw another 3 or 4 hares as well, but none as close as this one.
We also had a short-eared owl briefly over the fields and a marsh harrier but very distant. All of this was of course accompanied by whooper swans flying over for the evening feed at the main hide. As the rain really set in and we retreated back to the warmth of the hides we still saw a couple of hares moving out in the grass. They never go into burrows but just hunker down in low-lying forms to ride out the worst of the weather. Rather them than me.
We finished off by watching the evening swan feed but the numbers were down on other years. The feeding is still good out in the fields and we saw large flocks on the drive back. May be worth another trip for the walks, which go on until Spring, in better weather and light.
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