Brown hare hunt

The brown hare is a common species throughout all Europe, it’s only missing from those areas, where the snow does not melt in the summer either, or where it has been extinct due to health problems.

Brown hare hunting is probably the most tiring of all the small game that can be found in Hungary, since the most effective way to hunt brown hare is by driven hunt. 5-20 hunters and twice as many drivers participate at these field hare hunts, where they surround an area sometimes larger than 50-100 hectares in a circle or U shape and as the drive narrows down, they are trying to make the brown hare jump out from the half meter deep ditches of the autumn deep ploughing lines or from the cover of the high corn stubble.

The weather in November and December sometimes plays a joke with the hunters and the hard, frozen ground in the morning turns into a swamp later on in the day. When someone is not prepared for this physically, they will have a hard time completing this challenge. In case of dry or cold weather they number of prey might reach 100-200 pieces in the areas rich in hares.

If the hunt is organised not only for chasing brown hares, it’s fun to combine shooting them with pheasants or partridges. In this case 5-10 gunmen and the same number of drivers comb through more covered areas composed of small forest patches, reeds, grassy or not yet harvested areas. Shooting down brown hares suddenly fleeing from these covered places, or catching a pheasant cock scared by the pointing dog or the fox, which has been hiding persistently right until the last little hill is a great passion and an exciting and very active leisure activity.

These kinds of mixed bags can reach 100-200 pieces per day. Hunting along unfrozen waters we can also expect to encounter some wild ducks. Shooting brown hare can be combined with hunting big game very well, it’s especially exciting to combine it with driven hunting for wild boar. Many of our visitors challenge their long-range guns by culling roe-does on the rest days between small game shooting days, for which they don’t even have to leave the terrain.