My “birthday treat” has taken a slightly different turn in the last few years. Not for me, drinks at the pub with friends, a wild party or a family meal. If the weather forecast promises sun and a temperature of at least nine degrees, I head for the heaths hoping for an encounter with our only venomous snake, the adder.
Adders may look a little fierce from certain angles but they are not aggressive at all (Ben Andrew rspb-images.com)
It took me a long time to see an adder and having spent quite a bit of time looking for them in recent springs, I now know why – they are slippery customers and it is much easier to get it wrong than to get it right when it comes to finding them. So through my pitiful failures (ok it’s not that bad), I hope that you, dear reader, can learn from my mistakes and have a great time with adders this spring.
My birthday adder watch three years ago broke my duck once and for all and to my astonishment I managed to see more than 50 adders in a single morning, including the fabled “dancing” of two males. After that, I admit to having become a little bit cocky and blasé about how easy they are to see.
Find your heath, find your sun and hey presto, it's reptile time (Ben Hall rspb-images.com)
This year’s birthday treat saw me driving a couple of hours to my nearest spot of heathland with a good adder population, arriving at 08.45 ready for what I was convinced would be an adder show to end all adder shows. I expected to be tripping over the sunbathing serpents as they soaked up the early spring rays. The thermometer on my car moved to nine degrees as I pulled up in the car park, I popped on my gators, just in case I surprised a basking adder and a bite ensued and stepped out onto the sunlit slopes.
All the fieldcraft techniques clicked in: tread lightly, ensure shadow does not pass across likely basking spots, search engine tuned in to “coiled dog turd” and wacth for that tell tale zigzag diamond pattern.
Basking adders can look remarkably like a dog turd - until they flick out their tongue!
Things got off to a great start adding to my confidence – a lovely slow-worm coiled up among the bracken and common lizards skittering across the crispy fronds at every turn. Soon after, the temperature shot up and once the sun was out it was very hot. Two hours later, and no adders to show for what seemed like miles of walking, I knew something was wrong and that smug smile was well and truly gone from my face. I began to think I had blown it. It looked as if had warmed up too quickly and the basking beauties had slithered off back under the heather and gorse. "Whoops" I thought (or words to that effect).
It looks like a snake, but it's a legless lizard - the slow-worm is another springtime reptile treat (Ben Andrew rspb-images.com)
Fortunately, just minutes before I left for my “backup” site, I managed to finally see three adders, including a tiny, red youngster born last year. All quickly slithered back out of sight though. I used another neat trick of putting a stick in the ground at the basking spots so I could return when they had come back out again, but they did not return.
At the next destination, just 10 minutes away, things were looking good with woodlarks in song overhead, nestbuilding Dartford warblers, another slow-worm basking away under the blocks of gorse and stacks of common lizards again. Adders were on show here with a further eight added to my tally, but frustratingly all of them very quickly moved into cover once I'd spotted them.
Common lizards are a little more approachable than adders and like to bask too (Ben Andrew rspb-images.com)
A lesson learnedAll in all, it had been a good morning for numbers of reptiles, just not the views I’d like ideally. My visit had fallen a little in the no man’s land of being a few weeks after the adders had first emerged so they’d had plenty of time to warm up after hibernation and before they shed their skin and become lovely and bright eyed with the males sporting a smart blue-green and black look. There had also not been enough cloud cover so instead of sunny intervals, it had become very hot very quickly.
Lesson of the day? Never, ever, become cocky where nature is concerned, or make any assumptions!