My wife and I decided to take the road less traveled on our way home from Newbury to Witchurch today. We went from Eccinswell through Nutley Bottom and drove up the side of Watership Down before descending the gentle side of the escarpment through Ashley Warren. Its the sort of road that might not see more than one vehicle an hour, if that. Its also the sort of road if you do meet another vehicle coming in the other direction you might have to reverse back at least half a mile to find somewhere you can both pass.

Despite going pass two locations in the book Watership Down and through a historic Warren there were no rabbits to be seen. There were literally dozens of hares though.

We saw several at a distance in the fields. Then as we drove down the lane a hare was running in the field alongside the road no more than 10m from my van. It was almost as if the hare was giving us a race.

About half a mile further on and we came across these two hares less than 5m from the road. They obligingly stayed still for my wife to take their photos with her phone.

Best of all we turned a corner in the lane to see three hares "boxing" in the middle of the lane less than 10m in front of us. Two of them shot into the wood on the right hand side of the lane and the other one ran into the field on the left. They didn't want to move far away from one another but we couldn't get a pic as there was too much vegetation in the way.

Naturalists used to assume "boxing" hares were males fighting for dominance. Apparently it is actually a female hare fighting off the unwanted attention of a male. Perhaps the two in the wood were male and the other one in the field was a female?

#hares #MadMarchHares #BoxingHares #spring #Hampshire #NorthWessexDownsNationalLandscape #Witchchurch #WatershipDown