Hare today...

I don't only go out and photo birds. Although they can be quite tricky in the UK to get close to, furry instead of feathered beasties can make for lovely subjects. With Winter still well and truly with us, and a light covering of snow on the ground I didn't want to go too far away from home. My initial reason for a trip was to get another year tick. Corn buntings are increasingly rare in our countryside but breed and over-winter in good numbers in the arable fields around Wallingford. When I got there you could see the fields were very snowy but there was a lot of wildlife around. There were a lot of winter thrushes, especially fieldfares and decent numbers of corn buntings was well. What I noticed though were the hares. In virtually every field you could see 2, 3 or more hares either feeding or starting to chase each other. I decided to give up on looking for good views of the birds and focus on the hares instead.
The fields are large and open so you can't exactly creep up on anything as it can see you coming from miles off. I tried to keep to the fields edges and use the available hedgerows which allowed me to get pretty good views of some of the hares.

It must be pretty hard being a hare in these conditions. They don't have burrows to go into so have to tough it out. Their food, what there is of it, is frozen and hidden under the snow. You could certainly see they were trying very hard to feed up before the evening came on.
A few of the beasties moved between the fields and one was certainly quite surprised when it came through a hedge line and found me standing there. It diverted its path pretty quick and scampered off at speed. Just like gazelles "spronking" they do little jumps presumably to show predators how fit they are.

Others were a bit more chilled out and sat still watching me as I blundered though the snow. Eventually they would give up and amble away!

After an hour or so though they started to disappear. The reason was that a shoot had started up a few fields way. There are incredibly large numbers of partridge around and this would be their targets. Not only was there the introduced red-legged but quite a few of our native grey partridge as well.

I think this could be worth another visit. Pick a frosty morning, get there early and even take out my portable hide. They should be getting into boxing soon.
Oh, I did get another year tick earlier at Barnes WWT, a bittern. See if you can spot it!!!