Outdoor Photography

36 Outdoor Photography February 2018

QUICK GUIDE TO...Photographing mountain hare

The uplands of Scotland is an incredibly harsh environment, but it is also home to one of Britain’s fi nest mammals,

the mountain hare. Drew Buckley shares his top tips for creating stunning photographs of this elusive subject

Unlike their southern brown relatives,

mountain hares turn completely white

in winter, so looking for a white animal

on a snowy landscape is obviously going

to be tricky. Good places to look are in

upland areas such as heather moors and

mountain corries. Start your search well

above the tree line and on hills higher

than 400m in altitude (although in most

cases the hares will be far higher than

this). Throughout the winter months

• especially when there is snow on the
  ground – the hares will do a lot of sitting
  around to conserve energy so it pays to
  scour the hillside with binoculars for
  resting individuals.
  Just like us, hares will always try to
  shelter from bad weather, so what you’re
  looking for on the hillside are ‘forms’.
  These are small depressions in the
  landscape where a hare has scraped out
  an area in the snow in a gully, behind
  a boulder or just below an overhang of
  ground. Here they will sit all day, with
  their backs to the hillside, looking out
  across the landscape.

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