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

Anyone else think that a "Silflay hraka, u embleer rah" bumper sticker would go hard?

#WatershipDown

Not hearing nations' leaders invoking an "international rules based order".

There are three superpowers that have no need of IRBO.

Every other nation is either a vassal state to a superpower or dependent on IRBO.

The silence about IRBO tells me they know that Trump is running amok and that hiding in the briar patch is the safest strategy.

How did Watership Down turn out?

#IRBO #InternationalRulesBasedOrder #BrerRabbit #WatershipDown

"All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you - digger, listener, runner.... Be full of tricks, and your people shall never be destroyed."
- Richard Adams, "Watership Down"

#BookWormSat #Fiction #Literature #RichardAdams #WatershipDown #Animal #Rabbit

Looks like reality is catching up with fiction.

The map shows an overlay of new development in Newtown, UK. It sounds like development has already started in the red area, and will expand to the black area.

The marker for “Sandleford Park” is a possible location of Sandleford Warren featured at the beginning of Richard Adams’ book, Watership Down.

In the book and movie, Sandleford Warren is destroyed, killing most of its rabbits, to make way for a six-acre housing development. A real-life local effort opposed this development, but they announced last year they had failed.

The jagged border at the bottom shows the River Enborne that Hazel and his group crossed early in the story.

#RichardAdams #WatershipDown

If I have to see this, so do you

(Via r/grandmaspantry)

#WatershipDown #NotAChildrensMovie

"All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you... but first they must catch you."
Watership Down

#art #digitalart #drawing #mastoart #furry #furryart #watershipdown