Feldhase Autonomous Community of the Basque Country

The brown hare lives in open and half-open landscapes and is tightly bound to the cultivated countryside. It prefers richly structured farmland, the Feldflur, with hedges, field copses, field margins, and fallow strips that provide food and cover at the same time. Light forests, meadows, and edges are also used. By day the hare rests in its Sasse, a shallow form pressed into the ground from which it can survey the surroundings. When threatened it first relies on its excellent camouflage and presses flat into the Sasse, only breaking away at the last moment at high speed and with the characteristic zigzag jumps.

The Feldhase is mainly active at dusk and at night, moving onto the fields to feed in the morning and evening hours. In late winter and early spring the mating period, the Rammelzeit, makes it far more visible, with several animals gathering on the fields and engaging in the well-known boxing matches between bucks and does. In day-to-day practice across German-speaking Europe the hare is the classic Niederwild and the symbolic quarry of the autumn driven hunt, the Treibjagd, in which a line of guns walks fields and cover systematically with beaters and dog handlers.

Across large parts of central Europe populations have been declining for decades. The leading cause is the impoverishment of the agricultural landscape, in particular the loss of hedges, field margins, and fallow ground, together with heavy use of machinery and plant protection products and the disappearance of richly structured Feldfluren. Road traffic, harsh weather during the first weeks of life, and increased predation pressure all add to the picture. For this reason the management of small game, the Niederwildhege, sits at the centre of how the species is hunted: revier teams count their stock, match the bag to the population, and in thinly populated areas voluntarily refrain from driven hunts on hares, while at the same time improving habitat through flower strips, fallow land, and hedgerow structures.