Another Life:Meg's outings in the morning are in what might loosely be called my company, since, untethered, she is free to pause at leisure for the olfactory gossip on offer at particular rocks, hollows, clumps of rushes, writes Michael Viney
Only after pondering every last whiff of scandal does she scurry down the boreen to catch up.
A strong hint of hare detains her occasionally, left where the animal has squeezed beneath the fence at a well-worn U in the top of the grassy bank. It is as close as she gets to actual contact, since a hare can sit forever in the middle of the boreen, some way ahead, before Meg catches on.
A rare, hysterical pursuit always ends in a panting defeat at a field-gate.
Our national hare population seems to be doing all right, at least numerically. Indeed, the recent survey carried out for the National Parks and Wildlife Service* produced some extraordinary figures for the Republic - some 233,000 hares in early 2006 and 535,000 in early 2007. A doubling of the hare population in 12 months flat has raised a few eyebrows, even behind some desks in the NPWS.
The survey was directed by Quercus, the expert group set up in Queen's University Belfast to concentrate on biodiversity and conservation biology, and it refined tactics already used in surveys of hares in Northern Ireland.
Like any such survey, it was based on intensive sampling - in this case, of the most south-westerly square kilometre in each 10k-square on the Irish grid with a kilometre of road running through it (which came to 691 squares).
The survey's 40 teams, drawn mainly from NPWS field staff, were out on pick-up trucks at night, sweeping the roadside fields twice with a two-million-candlepower spotlight at every 200m and sometimes using a step-ladder to shine the beam over a hedge. Then, to nourish a new and subtle software programme, the distance to the cluster of spotlit hares and the angle from the observer was measured with a laser rangefinder and a protractor.
This, with some modelling magic, converts the number of animals seen into an estimate of the number actually present in the area searched. "Distance sampling" is already catching on for estimating densities of everything from birds to dolphins.
Done meticulously two years running, adjusted statistically for habitat variables, and multiplied up to the land area of the state, it revealed the dramatic, more-than-doubling, of the Republic's hares. But this was, it seems, entirely consistent with historical fluctuations deducible from game-bag records, together with the current estimates in the North, and with hare population dynamics elsewhere.
The doe of Lepus timidus hibernicus usually has two or three litters a year, spaced out between February and December, with three to five young in each. In a "good" year, indeed, breeding may be almost continuous, and a doe may conceive her next litter before the current one has been born.
The young are weaned in three weeks and mature in 12 months, but their mortality as leverets may be as high as 80 per cent, with many eaten by foxes or ravens or chewed up in silage mowers. Improve the survival rate to, say, 50 per cent and there's scope for a rapid and remarkable change in numbers.
On top of some complex cycles, arising from the size of the hare population itself, comes a response to external factors - the weather being one of them.
The Quercus report is big into the cyclic impact of the North Atlantic Oscillation - the to-and-fro of atmospheric pressure that governs our storm-tracks, rainfall temperature and so on.
Last year was one of the highest on the NAO Index for a decade, bringing such wet conditions in late spring and summer that silage cutting was delayed. Our "mountain" hare is almost unique in its preference for pastoral farmland, so the late mowing of grass helped more leverets to survive and mature. The warmth in the westerlies also gave us a mild autumn and winter, with a later growth of grass, better adult survival and perhaps even more leverets.
So, while there has been a long-term decline in Ireland's hare population as agriculture has intensified, judging its welfare from year to year is not going to be easy.
Given the findings of the Quercus survey, what becomes of the target in the Species Action Plan for the Irish hare to establish a population increase by 2010?
The all-Ireland estimate now stands at some 649,000: is that enough? Populations can halve as well as double.
The Quercus survey can't have come cheap. Indeed, one of its recommendations for "a cost-effective tool" for monitoring the future hare population is "to pilot the collection of capture effort data for coursing clubs". That seems to guarantee the future of a country pastime which, while not impinging greatly on the overall number of hares, has been seen to offer little for their comfort, muzzled or not.
* See Status of Hares in Ireland, Irish Wildlife Manual No 30, at www.npws.ie
Eye on Nature
On September 14th and 15th a flock of at least 70 red admiral butterflies appeared on the patch of flowering mint. Did the mint and butterflies come together after the wet summer?
Cliodna Cussen, Howth, Dublin 13
Both red admirals and flowers on mint are around into October. The large flock of butterflies means that there was a good local first hatch.
I was sitting in the sun doing the Irish Timescrossword when an insect landed on my the paper. It was about 1½ inches long with a thin, brown, segmented body and two beautiful, bronze, gossamer wings on each side.
Brigid Flanagan, Dundalk
The bronze wings suggest the brown hawker dragonfly, but it would have been about 2½ inches long.
I met an unusually coloured frog on his way to my small pond. The main colour was emerald green with two cream seams going down his back and cream patterns on the green.
Kathleen Wilson, Dalkey, Co Dublin
Common frogs are usually brown or greenish yellow, but they can lighten or darken their skin to match their environment. Also, female frogs are often brighter than males. Yours was indeed unusual.