By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent

Farmers and landowners can help brown hares in the UK to end their long decline, a wildlife group says.

It has published a guide listing simple changes in farming practices which it says will help the hares' survival.

Many of the measures are aimed at keeping the hares safe from predators, chiefly foxes.

The UK hare population is thought to have fallen by more than 75% since 1945.

The group is the Game Conservancy Trust (GCT), which works to ensure the future of game species in their natural habitat.

Hare-friendly farming

It says it has produced its guide to emphasise that conserving common animals is as important as saving rare ones.

The brown hare's decline may end (Image: GCT)

A century ago, the trust says, brown hares were abundant, but their decline since the second world war has left them with an estimated population of about 800,000 in the winter months.

It wants to restore the hares' fortunes, and is aiming for a target population of two million animals by 2010.

Advice offered in the guide includes:

• cut fields from the centre to the outside when making silage, to let hares escape the machines
• leave areas of uncut and ungrazed grass for leverets (young hares) to hide in
• break up large blocks of cereal crops, as hares like a "patchwork quilt" farmland
• do not shoot hares in late winter unless they are causing significant crop damage, as this can kill 60% of breeding animals.

A female hare can produce up to four litters a year, each with three leverets or more.

Fleet of foot

But the trust says modern farming can make the hares more vulnerable to foxes. A fox family can eat the entire production of the local hare population, it says, though they usually kill leverets rather than adult hares.

Hares breed prolifically

Brown hares are animals of the lowlands: in central England and upland Scotland they are replaced by mountain hares.

They can reach speeds of 70 kph (45 miles an hour) to escape predators. Unlike rabbits, they do not live in burrows, but in "forms", small depressions in the ground among long grass.

The Mammal Society attributes the hares' decline to increasingly specialised farming, which deprives them both of year-round grazing and of hiding places.

Human stresses

It says farm machinery and pesticides also kill many hares, and the rural fox population is a growing threat.

Hares are often shot either as game or because of the damage they do to crops and young trees.

They are hunted on foot by beagle packs, and on horseback by harriers. The GCT believes fewer than 5% of the hare population is killed this way annually.

Some also die during hare coursing, when they are pursued by greyhounds. But the trust says: "The object of the course is to pursue and turn the hare, not to kill it. Most hares escape because they have more stamina than a greyhound."