Snakes and Adders 19th May 2018

It was Sunday and another sunny and hot day was in prospect as I went in search of an Adder, Britain's only poisonous snake. I knew of a place, an unprepossessing little reserve tucked away in a corner of the Berkshire countryside which might yield a sighting.

An hour and a half later I could say, with feeling, it had been a long, tiring and fruitless search for an Adder. The rough stems and twigs of heather scratched my bare legs as I wandered across the heath searching for the elusive Adder, my frustration growing as in succession I raised several corrugated iron sheets, a favoured place of concealment, from their scattered cul de sacs of dead grass and heather, but had no luck in finding a snake hidden below any of them, sandwiched between the hot metal and cool dark earth.

My resolve was fading rapidly in the heat of mid day as I opted for one final search of the heather and stopped by some small silver birches, growing just above head height. For no reason I walked in a little way off a track into a tangle of heather and gorse behind the trees and came across the remains of a long dead female Mallard, its breast bone, an inverted keel, sharp edged and whitened by the sun, the bone lying amongst a handful of scattered brown and white feathers. Probably it was the work of a Fox which had taken the unfortunate duck into this secluded spot to make an untroubled meal.

I hardly noticed him at first but he was lying across the duck's sunlit feathery remains, looking like an age whitened, black patterned, convoluted stick, the object of my desire, a male Adder. His body lengthwise was about two feet long and lay stretched in an idle curve in the sun, very pale, almost bone white in the brilliant sunlight with dorsal, black, zebra like zigzagging running the entire length of his body.

His triangular blunt  nosed head with opaque red eyes shone in the hard light and  was raised slightly from the horizontal, watching, sensing my presence but he was still reluctant to retreat from the energising heat of the sun. He had sensed my unsuspecting approach before I saw him and was in the process of slipping back into the cover of the last of the winter withered grass and heather as I discovered him and had frozen in mid retreat, trusting his bracken frond patterning might still prevent me noticing him.

A minute, no more, passed as we regarded each other in mutual surprise and then I took one more step closer and it was too much. He knew he was discovered and slow and sinuous he slid away, silently straightening his cylindrical body from its elegant curve and retreated back into a dark and hidden depth below the gorse and was gone.