Why the Mountain Hare Rewards an Early Start

There is a particular quality to the light on a British moorland just after dawn in late autumn. The sun sits low and rakes across the heather, turning it copper and gold, and shadows stretch long across the peat. It is at this hour that the mountain hare is at its most visible, and yet most walkers will pass within a few metres of one without ever knowing it. The mountain hare, known in Scotland simply as the blue hare, is a master of stillness. It does not bolt like a rabbit. It crouches, flattens its ears along its back, and trusts entirely in its camouflage. Learn to read the moor properly, and this trust becomes your best chance of a sighting.

These animals are native to the Scottish Highlands and have been introduced to parts of the Pennines, the Peak District and the Cheviots. They are not the same creature as the brown hare of lowland fields. They are smaller, stockier, with shorter ears and a tendency to sit tight rather than run. If you have ever flushed a hare at close range and felt your heart jump, you have met this animal on its terms, not yours.

Reading the Ground: Where Hares Shelter

Mountain hares do not dig burrows. Instead, they rely on forms, shallow scrapes in the vegetation or heather, often against a bank or the lee side of a rise. These forms are used again and again, and over time they become worn patches that you can learn to recognise. Look for a flattened hollow roughly the size of a dinner plate, usually surrounded by taller heather or bracken for cover.

The best moorland for hares has a mosaic of vegetation. Pure close-cropped grass is poor; so is dense, unbroken conifer plantation. What you want is heather of varying heights, patches of blaeberry, some rough tussocky grass and perhaps a few scattered rocks. Hares favour the edges where two habitats meet, because they offer both cover and a clear view.

• Heather banks on south-facing slopes catch the first light and warm up quickly, so hares often move onto them at dawn.
• Old stone walls and grouse butts provide shelter from wind and make useful anchors to search around.
• Peat hags and gullies hold warmth and moisture, and their broken edges give hares cover.
• Bracken beds in their dead winter state are superb hiding places, though the hares will have moved to shorter ground by then.

Walk with the light behind you where you can. A hare facing into the low sun is almost impossible to pick out, but backlit animals show a faint rim of pale fur and a dark eye that the eye catches instantly.

Watching Without Disturbance

The single most useful skill is patience. Hares spend long periods motionless, and your instinct is to keep walking. Resist it. Find a high point with a good view, settle down out of the wind, and wait. Fifteen or twenty minutes of stillness will reveal far more than an hour of striding about.

Move slowly and use your binoculars to scan rather than your feet to explore. Sweep the ground in slow horizontal bands, looking not for a whole animal but for a shape that seems slightly wrong. The giveaway is often the ear tips, dark against the pale winter coat, or the dark eye set into a rounded head.

• Keep to paths where they exist. Off-path walking on fragile moorland compresses vegetation and damages the very cover hares depend on.
• Keep dogs on a short lead. A loose dog will put a hare up from its form and can chase it to exhaustion, particularly in snow.
• Stay downwind if you can. Hares have excellent hearing and a strong sense of smell.
• Do not approach a hare that is crouching. If it flattens its ears and freezes, you are already too close.
• Use a telephoto lens rather than creeping nearer. A good photograph taken from twenty metres is worth far more than a poor one from five.

If a hare does run, note the direction and leave it be. It will usually circle back to its form within a few hours once it is satisfied the danger has passed.

The Coat That Changes With the Seasons

The mountain hare's most famous trait is its seasonal wardrobe. In summer it is a mix of browns and greys, blending with the heather and rock. As autumn shortens the days, it moults into a white or pale grey coat, though the ears keep their black tips year round. This change is triggered by day length, not temperature, which is why hares in mild coastal areas still turn white even when there is no snow.

The transformation is not instant. It happens over several weeks, and you can often see animals in mottled transitional coats in October and November, half brown and half white, as though they have been dipped in milk. In spring the process reverses, and by late April most hares are back in their brown summer dress.

Interestingly, the change is less complete in Ireland and in some Scottish coastal populations, where hares may stay largely brown. In the Highlands, the white coat is a genuine advantage against snow, but in a low-snow winter it can make a hare startlingly conspicuous. This mismatch is one of the reasons some conservationists worry about climate change in upland Britain.

A Quiet Hour Well Spent

Mountain hares are not rare, but they are easily overlooked, and that is rather the point. A morning spent on the moor, cold hands wrapped around a flask, scanning a heather bank as the light strengthens, is its own reward whether or not you find one. When you do, stay still, watch from a distance, and let the animal go about its business. That is the whole art of it: not chasing the sighting, but earning it. Take a grid reference, note the weather, and come back in a different season. The same bank will show you a different hare, and quite possibly a different moor entirely.