Return to the Blog Home Page
How watching a group of hares in snow led to a new collection of winter hare paintings.
Many don’t like snow, but I love it. There is nothing that transforms the landscape so fast. Overnight you find yourself in a totally different environment and this can present so many opportunities for my photography and artwork. Last year we had a flurry in November but it didn’t last the day. This was followed by so many wet and windy storms I was getting worried the MET office, that was using the alphabet to give each storm a sequential name, would run out of letters. Then finally in January the snow came. Not a lot, but enough for me to get some video footage of some hares. I drove to some fields where I often see hares. And sure enough, I spotted a few in the distance straight away. They looked like specks of brown on a pure white background. But I wanted to find a larger group so that I could film the interactions between them. I scanned the landscape with my binoculars and soon spotted a group of eight on a distant field. I continued my search and picked out a further 30 hares, some of them actually boxing. This field was clearly the place to go for. I rang the landowner to get permission to film and then set off.
Dressed in my white ski suit I headed up a tram line, made by a tractor wheel, which took me directly towards the hares. It was slow going. I wanted to get close enough to the hares to film them so I gradually walked closer, stopping whenever they showed signs of having spotted me. It was like a game of grandmother’s footsteps. After a couple of hours I was in photographing range of eight hares, frolicking in the snow. The group seemed to have got used to my presence. I didn’t manage to film any actual full-on boxing but I had shots of some chasing one another about and even a few spats. Then I heard a dog yapping. Suddenly more hares came over the brow of the hill in front of me. The hares that I had been watching flattened their ears and squatted to the ground. Some of them dashed off. There were hares running in all directions. Then a lurcher ran across the field in hot pursuit of a hare, followed by a yappy mongrel.The dogs disappeared. But now there was not a hare in sight. They weren’t poachers’ running dogs. The yappy crossbreed wouldn’t be fast enough to catch a hare. After a while some of the buck hares came back into the field looking for the does. But they were very jumpy and soon dashed off again.
Feeling disgruntled, I headed off to a different field on the other side of the valley. There, I spotted two more groups. One of eight and one of 10, with a few stragglers around the edges of each. I headed to the smallest and nearest group. I started making my approach slowly and then out of nowhere a bank of fog rolled in and enveloped me. I couldn’t see a thing. It was like being in a giant white margarine tub. I heard the faint call of a grey partridge. The sound got gradually louder and louder and then a ghostly partridge appeared out of the mist, running and calling. I watched as its silhouette disappeared and faded into the fog, along with its call. Alone again I tried to navigate by looking at my footsteps behind me. As long as these were in a straight line, I judged that I was still going towards the group of hares.
Then I saw a buck try his luck with a female. He sniffed at her but she looked less than interested and hunkered further down into the snow. Another buck chased this rival off in a circle around the group. There
were two females amongst them – I could tell they were female by the obvious attention they got from the bucks and by the fact that they were slightly smaller with finer heads and paler fur than the more ginger bucks. Their body posture also gave them away. They tended to stay huddled down in the snow, defensively. At last the fog began to clear. I watched the group for an hour. It was fascinating seeing the bucks jostling for position in the group and amusing to see how all their antics did little to impress the females who continued to hunker down into the snow.
The experience inspired a new collection of paintings of hares in snow, see below. Don’t miss my next exhibition, opening at my gallery in Thixendale on November 4th-26th, where I will be showing my very latest collection of paintings inspired by wildlife in winter. See below or click here for more information.
Hare grooming, painted by Robert E Fuller
3 comments on How watching a group of hares in snow led to a new collection of winter hare paintings.