Photographing Brown Hares in Somerset
Learning the landscape, reading behaviour and allowing the photograph to come to you
There are places we photograph because we discover them, and others that have been part of us long before we ever picked up a camera.
For me, this landscape is the latter.
I grew up around these fields. I knew the shape of the land, the woodland edges, the margins and the way the light moved across the hills long before I began seriously photographing wildlife.
Over time, that familiarity has become inseparable from the way I photograph the brown hares that live here.
The site supports a population of around thirty to forty individuals, and I return to the same handful of fields throughout the year. What once seemed unpredictable has gradually revealed a pattern. Certain areas are used repeatedly for feeding. Open stubble produces a different kind of behaviour. Particular routes connect one part of the landscape with another. The seasons alter those opportunities, and eventually even some of the individual hares themselves become familiar.
The hares are not visitors to an anonymous location. They are part of a landscape I already understand.
That familiarity changes the experience.
Rather than arriving and simply hoping to find a hare, I increasingly arrive with an idea of where they may be, where they may be going, and what the light will be doing when they get there.
For me, photographing them has become less about chasing encounters and more about understanding where those encounters are likely to happen.
The longer I spend here, the more I realise that the photograph often begins long before I press the shutter.
Knowing the Landscape
Knowing the land has proved almost as important as knowing the animal.
In the morning, much of the low sunlight is hidden behind nearby woodland. The fields can still be beautifully quiet, but the first golden light rarely reaches the areas where I most often photograph the hares in the way I want it to.
Evening is different.
As the sun lowers, the light begins to roll across the hillside. Dry grasses catch along their edges. Stubble starts to glow. On the right evening, the whole environment can take on an almost amber quality.
That is the light I return for.
Sometimes it catches nothing more than the edge of a hare’s ear. Sometimes it passes through the fur along its back and separates the animal from the landscape. At other times, the colour of the land becomes so important that the environment itself carries as much emotion as the hare.
It has taught me not to think of “golden hour” as a universal formula.
Every location has its own relationship with the sun.
Spend enough time in one place and you begin to understand where the light will arrive, which backgrounds will transform, and which fields will still be holding warmth when the rest of the landscape has fallen into shade.
The lesson, for me, is not simply that evening is better than morning.
It is to learn the light on the landscape you photograph.
Long before a hare appears, I usually have some idea of where I would like it to be.
And while the evening light here can be extraordinary, overcast conditions can be just as rewarding, softening the landscape and producing a very different kind of photograph.
Learning Where the Hares Want to Be
The next layer was understanding how the hares use the land.
One of the most useful things repeated visits have taught me is that a landscape that appears uniform to us is rarely uniform to wildlife.
Different parts of these fields serve different purposes.
The edges of cover crops and field margins are regular feeding areas. In spring, these can be particularly productive photographically. Fresh growth is still short enough that the hares remain visible as they feed, while the surrounding vegetation creates beautifully soft foregrounds when photographed from ground level.
There is often a calmness to these encounters.
A feeding hare may move only a short distance at a time, pausing to listen before lowering its head again. That slower rhythm gives me time to watch what is happening, consider the background and decide how I want to make the photograph.
Later in the year, the same areas become very different.
By summer, the cover can grow high enough for a hare to disappear almost completely within it. The animals have not necessarily left; the photographic opportunity has changed.
So I change with it.
Rather than continuing to search for the same kind of images simply because they worked a few months earlier, I begin spending more time watching the routes that connect one part of the site to another.
That has been one of the most valuable lessons of returning to the same population through the seasons:
Wildlife may continue using a place long after that place has stopped being photographically useful.
Recognising the difference saves a great deal of frustration.
Wildlife Highways
Between feeding areas, resting places and open fields are routes that the hares use repeatedly.
I think of them as wildlife highways.
At first, many of these routes are almost invisible.
Then you begin to notice a hare appearing from the same corner of a field. Another crosses a particular strip of ground. An animal leaves one feeding area and follows almost exactly the same line towards another.
Eventually, patterns begin to reveal themselves.
Once I understand one of these routes, it changes the way I work.
Rather than seeing a hare in the distance and immediately thinking:
How do I get closer to that hare?
I can ask a much more useful question:
Where is that hare likely to want to go next?
That shift has changed my fieldcraft more than almost anything else.
If I can anticipate the route, I can consider the light, background, wind direction and my own position before the animal is anywhere near me.
I can choose where to lie.
I can make sure my silhouette is broken by the landscape.
I can think about what the frame might look like if the hare follows the pattern I have watched before.
Then I wait.
If it does, the hare closes the distance naturally.
Those encounters often feel the most rewarding because the animal is simply moving through its own landscape.
I have only placed myself in the right part of it.
Different Ground, Different Behaviour
The open stubble fields tell a different story.
Where the margins and cover crops tend to produce quieter feeding behaviour, open ground gives the hares room to run.
This is where I most often see chasing, sudden changes of direction and, at the right time of year, boxing.
The energy is completely different.
A feeding hare may give me time to think carefully about composition. Chasing animals demand anticipation. The behaviour can move across a field incredibly quickly, and a moment that looked promising a second earlier may already have disappeared.
But knowing where that behaviour tends to happen makes an enormous difference.
I am no longer simply reacting to whatever appears in front of me.
I can think about what each part of the landscape is likely to produce.
For anyone trying to photograph hares, that is perhaps one of the most useful things to learn:
Do not only look for the animal. Look at how the animal is using the habitat.
A feeding area, a travel route and an open field may sit only a short distance apart, yet each can offer an entirely different photograph.
Finding wildlife is only the beginning.
Understanding how wildlife uses the landscape is what begins to create repeatable opportunities.
The Value of Returning
Returning to the same place repeatedly has changed the way I see the population.
At first, a hare was simply a hare.
Over time, differences begin to emerge.
The shape of an ear. A particular marking. The proportions of an individual. Occasionally even the way an animal behaves in a familiar part of the site.
There are hares here that I now recognise.
There is something quietly rewarding about seeing an animal and realising I have photographed it before.
It creates continuity.
Wildlife photography can sometimes feel built around isolated encounters — arrive, photograph, leave.
Working with the same population is different.
You begin to see the year unfold around them.
Spring growth rises into summer cover. Crops disappear and stubble returns. Familiar routes become more or less useful photographically. The angle of the evening sun shifts gradually across the land.
The animals remain part of the same wider landscape, but the way I photograph them has to evolve with it.
The more familiar the place becomes, the less random the photography feels.
Approaching a Hare
There are occasions when I approach a hare directly, but the way I approach makes an enormous difference.
If I remain upright, these particular hares generally become more alert at a much greater distance. Around forty metres is often where I begin to notice a change.
When I am prone, the situation can be very different.
By keeping my profile low, moving extremely slowly and stopping frequently, I have occasionally had encounters develop at distances closer to ten metres.
But I never treat distance as a target.
Getting closer is not automatically getting better.
The photograph I want is of a hare behaving naturally, not an animal whose attention has become entirely focused on me.
So I watch constantly for changes.
A different posture.
Increased vigilance.
An animal that was feeding but has now stopped to watch me.
The useful question is not:
How close can I get?
It is:
How close can this encounter become without changing what the animal is doing?
If the answer changes, I stop.
Sometimes the best approach is no approach at all.
Small Details That Matter
Fieldcraft is rarely one dramatic technique.
More often, it is a collection of small decisions.
Wind direction is one of them.
I find encounters considerably easier when the wind is carrying my scent away from the hares rather than towards them.
Weather and ground conditions can change the way I approach as well.
During long, dry periods, grasses and vegetation can become brittle underfoot. A movement that might have been almost silent a few months earlier can suddenly produce a crack loud enough to give away my position. In spring, or after rain, the same ground can feel completely different. Soft, lush vegetation absorbs movement and can make a careful approach considerably quieter.
It is another reason I try not to think of fieldcraft as a fixed technique.
The landscape changes with the weather, and the way I move through it has to change too.
My position against the landscape matters too.
If I place myself where vegetation, a bank or rising ground breaks up my outline, encounters often develop more naturally than when I am silhouetted against open sky.
Even clothing seems to make a difference.
I tend to wear the same camouflage when working this site and, through repeated visits, have found that I generally move through the landscape more successfully than when dressed in ordinary clothing.
None of these things guarantees an encounter.
Wild animals do not work to a formula.
But collectively, these small decisions can reduce the amount of attention I draw to myself.
The less important I become to the animal, the more interesting its behaviour becomes.
The Art of Waiting
Some of my closest encounters have come from doing almost nothing.
If I know a route is being used regularly, I can choose a position beside it in advance.
I look at the wind.
I consider where the evening light will fall.
I make sure my outline is broken by the landscape rather than silhouetted against the sky.
I study the background.
Then I lie down and wait.
There may be long periods when apparently nothing is happening.
But these fields have taught me not to trust first impressions.
A field that looks empty is not necessarily empty.
Hares can disappear into remarkably little vegetation. Even on apparently open ground, an animal can remain completely unnoticed until the movement of a head or the tips of two ears suddenly reveal where it has been sitting all along.
That has taught me to slow down.
When I arrive somewhere and see nothing, I rarely assume there is nothing to see.
I watch.
The longer I remain still, the more the landscape seems to settle around me.
Birds resume normal behaviour. The disturbance of my arrival disappears. Small movements become easier to notice.
And occasionally, almost imperceptibly, a hare appears.
Those encounters are difficult to beat.
They feel discovered rather than pursued.
The animal is moving through its own world, on its own route, and I have simply put myself in a position to witness it.
When Things Go Wrong
Not every encounter works perfectly.
There are times when I misjudge a situation or accidentally cause a hare to move away.
I think it is important to be honest about that.
Good fieldcraft is learned partly through success and partly through recognising when you have made a mistake.
With this particular population, I have repeatedly seen hares return to an area after moving away, sometimes resuming apparently normal behaviour twenty to forty minutes later.
That observation has taught me not to pursue them.
If an animal chooses to create distance, I would much rather remain where I am and give it space than continue applying pressure.
Often, doing nothing is the better fieldcraft.
Sometimes the hare returns.
Sometimes it does not.
Either is fine.
There are also afternoons when I spend hours watching a field and produce very little.
Those sessions still have value.
I might discover another route.
I might notice where an animal appeared from or where it disappeared to.
I may learn that one section of a field catches the final light more effectively than another.
What looks like an unsuccessful evening can easily become the information that makes a photograph possible weeks later.
The photographs often come later.
Intimacy Through Distance
When I do get the opportunity for a close photograph, I am usually working with a long lens and from as close to ground level as possible.
The long focal length serves two purposes.
Practically, it allows me to maintain distance.
Visually, it gives me the compression and softness I enjoy.
At ground level, an ordinary field changes completely.
Foreground vegetation begins to dissolve into colour and shape. Distant detail compresses into softer layers. The hare sits within the landscape rather than appearing to have been photographed from above it.
That is the feeling I am usually looking for.
I want the viewer to feel as though they are lying there too.
At that height, very small details can suddenly become the entire photograph.
The curve of an ear.
A line of evening light passing through the fur.
The reflection in an eye.
A few soft stems moving through the foreground.
There is an intimacy to that perspective, even though the photographer remains at a respectful distance.
But not every encounter needs to become a portrait.
Leaving Room for the Landscape
Some encounters need space.
There are times when the light, weather or surrounding field says as much about the experience as the animal itself.
On those occasions, I deliberately allow the hare to become smaller within the frame.
The photograph becomes less about identifying the animal and more about its relationship with the landscape.
A single hare within an expanse of evening stubble can feel very different from the same animal photographed tightly.
One is intimate.
The other may feel solitary, peaceful or vulnerable.
Neither approach is more correct.
The decision depends on what I felt when I saw the scene.
For me, the two approaches complement one another.
The intimate photograph allows us to meet the individual.
The environmental photograph tells us where it belongs.
And sometimes moving closer would actually make the image weaker.
Colour, Form and Monochrome
The same thinking influences whether an image remains in colour.
When the light is contributing strongly to the emotion of a photograph, I want to preserve it.
The warm evenings here can produce muted greens, deep browns and extraordinary amber tones.
In those photographs, colour is not decorative.
It is part of the reason the photograph exists.
But sometimes colour begins to compete with what interested me in the first place.
A curve through the body.
The graphic shape of two ears.
The relationship between two animals.
Light and shadow.
Negative space.
When form and structure become the most important elements, I may remove colour entirely.
Black and white simplifies the frame.
It asks the viewer to look at shape rather than hue.
For me, the decision is never about whether monochrome makes a photograph appear more artistic.
It is simply about understanding what is doing the emotional work.
If that is colour, I keep it.
If it is form, the colour may no longer be necessary.
A Photograph Before It Happens
The photographs I value most often feel as though they began long before I pressed the shutter.
I may know that the hares have been feeding in one part of the site.
I know the route they tend to use when leaving it.
I know which direction they usually travel.
I know which side of that route will place the evening light behind them.
I know where I can lie without being silhouetted against the skyline.
And I know what background I will have if the animal follows the pattern I have watched before.
By the time I settle into position, many of the photographic decisions have already been made.
Then comes the one part I cannot control.
The hare.
Sometimes the prediction is wrong.
The animal chooses another route.
It disappears into cover.
The light fades.
Nothing appears at all.
And occasionally, everything aligns.
A familiar shape emerges at the edge of the field and begins moving along the same route I have watched many times before.
The light reaches the hillside at exactly the right moment.
For a few seconds, all of that accumulated knowledge becomes a photograph.
Those are often the images that mean the most to me.
Not necessarily because they are technically the most difficult, but because they represent far more than the fraction of a second recorded by the camera.
The photograph does not show the afternoons that produced nothing.
It does not show the routes learned gradually.
The failed approaches.
The changing crops.
The light watched across seasons.
The individual animals recognised and rediscovered.
The years of familiarity with the land itself.
All of that exists outside the frame.
But all of it is part of the photograph.
What the Hares Have Taught Me
Photographing this population has gradually changed the way I think about wildlife photography.
I used to place much more importance on the encounter itself.
Now I think much more about everything that comes before it.
Knowing the land.
Recognising behaviour.
Understanding light.
Watching the seasons change.
Learning where the animals feed and how they travel between those places.
Knowing when to move and, perhaps more importantly, when not to.
The longer I spend with these hares, the less interested I become in forcing a photograph.
The better I understand the landscape, the less I need to impose myself upon what is happening within it.
There is something deeply satisfying about lying quietly at the edge of a Somerset field in the last light of the day, knowing that a hare may eventually appear along a route I have watched many times before.
There is no guarantee.
That is part of the attraction.
Sometimes the evening passes without a photograph.
Sometimes two ears appear above the vegetation.
And occasionally, light, behaviour and place come together for a few seconds in a way that feels almost inevitable.
Those are the moments I return for.
When they happen, the resulting photograph feels different.
It feels earned not through pursuit, but through familiarity.
And perhaps that is why I continue returning to the same fields.
There will always be another evening.
Another change in the landscape.
Another familiar hare appearing somewhere unexpected.
And occasionally, another photograph.
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