Mountain hare blog

Scott Newey, an ecologist from the James Hutton Institute, explores the issues facing Mountain Hares – and explains why we don’t even know how many there are.

There are lots of good reasons to know how many mountain hares there are and how they are responding to management and environmental change, but there is no easy and tested way of reliably counting mountain hares. Hares are notoriously difficult to count: they are mostly active at night and tend to remain inactive during the day, when they tend to seek refuge in “forms” (shelters) in tall heather or other protected locations; and they are also quite cryptic or well camouflaged. Their rapid changes in numbers as the populations ‘cycle’ means that there can quite naturally be a very wide range in population size in the same area in different years.

The James Hutton Institute, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust and Scottish Natural Heritage are carrying out a project trialling different methods of counting mountain hares. The project involves applying different survey methods; population estimation by live trapping and recapturing marked individuals, walking transects and counting hares, night time counts using powerful lamps and thermal imaging equipment, as well as counting their deposited dung pellets. These methods are compared side-by-side on the same areas over the same period to in order to calibrate and cross check them. At the end of the project we will produce guidelines and the most appropriate survey method for mountain hares to enable land manages and conservationists to estimate hare numbers to make informed management decisions.

For more information: www.hutton.ac.uk/hares/