Why adders could disappear from the British countryside within 10 …
Somewhere deep in Herefordshire’s Golden Valley lies a secret world of soldiers and snakes. The SAS trains here in the lee of the Black Mountains and a steady blast of machine-gun fire interrupts the morning birdsong. Across the valley, we traverse a hillside bank of flowering gorse grazed by wild Exmoor ponies, our eyes fixed upon another clandestine assassin lurking in the shadows.
Here among the woodland glades resides a sizeable population of Britain’s only venomous snake: the adder. It is the perfect morning on which to see the snakes, warm and still. ‘It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,’ as Shakespeare noted in Julius Caesar. ‘And that craves wary walking.’
At this time of year male adders (part of the viper family)[1] emerge from their winter burrows and bask in the sun to build up their strength. When they deem themselves in sufficient condition, they slough off their skin like an old sock, illuminating the gleaming black zigzag pattern that runs the length of their silver bodies. Then they slither off in search of a mate.
We tread slowly over clumps of wood anemone and golden bracken, chiffchaff and willow warblers fluting from the trees.
I am with Nigel Hand, one of Britain’s foremost experts on adders, who has cultivated this landscape to make it a perfect habitat. Over winter he has cut horseshoe-shaped clearances into copses of blackthorn and birch, sculpted terraced ‘adder patios’ where the vipers can sunbathe, and dug ephemeral ponds into the Herefordshire clay. And, above all, he has endeavoured to keep people away. Our exact location is confidential, even to me. Hand admits as we walk that he has deliberately taken us on the most circuitous route possible to prevent me retracing our steps.
Nigel Hand looking for adders underneath a shelter
Credit: Marsha Arnold for The Telegraph
The reason for such secrecy is that we do not mix well, the adders and us. Our oldest written texts reflect an ancient enmity towards the snakes, which persists into the modern age. Adders, along with other species of serpent including asps, feature more than 50 times in the Bible. The reptile references start with an unspecified snake persuading Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and things go downhill from there. In British folklore, adders are blamed for everything from bringing about King Arthur’s demise to being a portent of death if found on a person’s doorstep.
But humans spell far more trouble for adders than they do for us. An authoritative study published in 2019, based on 11 years of monitoring across Britain, found that 90 per cent of all the adder sites surveyed were severely declining. In the wake of the study, which was the first national survey of adder population trends, many experts claim that the snake could all but disappear from much of the countryside within the next decade or so[2].
In recent weeks, the Government has announced that the reptiles will be considered alongside other species on the brink, such as red squirrels[3] and hedgehogs[4], as part of a new £25 million ‘species survival fund’ aimed at creating and restoring large-scale natural habitats.
Despite the resurgence of official interest in their plight, however, Hand estimates that in the coming years the snakes will have been extirpated from much of southern England, and the areas of the Midlands where the 59-year-old monitored them as a boy and devoted his career to keeping them safe.
Climate change is impacting adders. They have evolved to survive British winters by hibernating in frost-free shelters such as tree stumps or old rodent burrows known as hibernacula. However warmer winters are coaxing snakes out too early, making them vulnerable to any sudden shift in the weather. Intensifying summer heat and wildfires are also proving devastating for populations of snakes evolved to more temperate climes and whose northern range extends to the Arctic. An increase in predators such as pheasants[6], buzzards and crows[7] is believed to be having a detrimental impact too.
Mostly, though, the problem is us: encroaching upon their habitat and coming into conflict with the snakes. New road, rail and housing schemes have cut off disparate adder populations, raising fears of a limited gene pool. Dog walkers, grazing livestock, off-road vehicles and mountain bikers all spell disaster for them too.
‘We don’t expect them to become extinct within the foreseeable future but there is a real prospect of them becoming a very rare species rather than widespread,’ explains Dr John Wilkinson, science programme manager with the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust, which has been closely involved in surveying adder populations.
As he points out, adders occupy a vital role in the ecosystem and their disappearance also presents a risk to human health. Rodents comprise a significant part of their diet and by consuming them the snakes help manage tick-borne diseases[8], in which there has been a marked increase in the British countryside in recent years. In April, the UK Health Security Agency confirmed the first domestically acquired case of tick-borne encephalitis – in a 50-year-old man bitten while mountain biking in Yorkshire.
Then there is the unquantifiable loss for future generations of a creature so ingrained in our culture, for good and ill. ‘It is a pauperisation of the countryside,’ Dr Wilkinson argues. ‘Adders are top predators and the closest thing to a Bengal tiger we have got left.’
Hand (left) helps Joe Shute look for adders in the Herefordshire habitat
Credit: Marsha Arnold for The Telegraph
Adders have resided in Britain since around the end of the last Ice Age. Some 10,000 years ago the snakes drove north in the face of the retreating ice across the land bridge that still connected us to the European continent. The reason Ireland does not have any adders (or indeed other snakes) is nothing to do with St Patrick driving them into the ocean, but due to the fact the island had broken away from Europe thousands of years previously.
Growing up to 60cm long, adders are denizens of the wildest parts of the British Isles: heathland, moor, ancient woodland and coastal cliffs. Not content with letting them rest there, for centuries humans have been trying to drive them into oblivion.
In his book Silent Fields, which documents the Tudor vermin acts of the 16th century and introduction of bounty payments for the extermination of a vast range of species in the British countryside, Roger Lovegrove details parish records showing hundreds of the snakes being killed in a matter of hours in Bedfordshire and Lancashire. The vermin acts prioritised food production above all else and snakes were targeted because of the threat they posed to agricultural labourers and foresters. By the 18th century, viper-catchers operated across the country and even patrolled the streets of London. In the 1860s in Sussex, Lovegrove records, groups of children were paid half a shilling each for the body of a snake.
Most prominent among the Victorian snake-catchers was Harry ‘Brusher’ Mills. Heavily bearded, pipe-smoking and often spotted patrolling the New Forest with a forked stick and sack, Mills boasted that he had killed tens of thousands of snakes over the course of his lifetime.
Nowadays, adders are protected from deliberate persecution under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act, although there has never been a successful prosecution of someone mistreating the snakes. Last summer the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) published new guidance that said sites of special scientific interest (SSSI) could be determined on the basis of populations of adders (as well as other reptiles and amphibians). Campaigners argue that given their plight, they should be afforded similar safeguards to great crested newts, whereby they are protected against any disturbance of their habitat.
Nigel Hand says he has heard many ‘horror stories’ of modern persecution: forestry workers tipping diesel into adder burrows and the bodies of slain snakes strung up on gate posts. Partly this is due to an entrenched cultural loathing of the snakes, which persists in the countryside. And also because when they are disturbed the adders do, on occasion, bite back. Currently around 50 to 100 people are bitten by an adder every year across Britain. Since 1876 there have been only 14 recorded deaths as a result of an adder bite. The last occasion was in 1975 when a five-year-old boy died after being bitten on the ankle in the Trossachs in Scotland.
The freshly shedded skin of an adder
Credit: Marsha Arnold for The Telegraph
Around 20 years ago, Hand was also bitten. It happened when he was working at a printing firm, combining gruelling night shifts with his passion for snakes. Rather than catching up on sleep during the day, he would head out to his local patch in the Malvern Hills where he has monitored snakes since the 1980s. He blames himself rather than the adder. After encountering one on a path, he carelessly picked it up to assess its condition and the snake coiled around and sunk its fangs into his left hand.
A metallic taste spread across his mouth which he likens to licking a battery, and his arm started to swell. After making it back home he phoned his wife, Kate, to tell her he had been bitten and noticed his speech beginning to slur. Soon he was suffering bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea.
As the venom spread through his body, Hand decided to wait it out; part stubbornness, part fascination with monitoring his own symptoms. He was bitten on a Friday and only went to the GP the following Wednesday, who immediately dispatched him to hospital in Hereford. He was the first adder bite they had seen and a queue of consultants and junior doctors jostled to assess his condition. In the end, Hand’s body flushed out the poison without the need for any antivenom, although it took around a month for the mobility in his fingers to return.
Hand has been searching for snakes all his life. Growing up in the Wolverhampton suburbs, he spent his childhood hunting along the canal towpaths and urban scrub. He doesn’t know where his passion came from and says his father tried to encourage him to play golf instead. When he used to take him out on the local course, however, Hand would instead disappear into the rough, trying to find adders.
He is largely self-taught and has worked as a professional ecologist since around 2005. He admits his hearing is not what it was – a consequence of too many punk gigs in his youth – but he still possesses an uncanny ability to detect snakes in a landscape. Indeed, he was the man recruited to find the adders for the recent David Attenborough Wild Isles series, which featured mesmerising footage of the snakes mating.
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Hand has developed a special radio telemetry technique to tag snakes and follow their movements but is equally adept at relying upon his own reptilian intuition. He tells me he can even smell adders (a damp, musty scent like wet hessian bags). As if to illustrate his point, a freshly sloughed male adder suddenly shimmers out of some dried bracken close to our feet. Its belly is tinged with a luminescent blue and it regards us with a fiery red eye before slithering back into the undergrowth.
Nigel has monitored many of the original sites mentioned in what is regarded as the bible of British herpetologists, The Life History of British Serpents and their Local Distribution in the British Isles, written by Gerald Rowley Leighton and published in 1901. He has found that areas where Leighton once logged the snakes in abundance are now entirely devoid of adders. ‘I’ve seen them decline in my own lifetime,’ he says.
One potential culprit is the pheasant, tens of millions of which are released into the British countryside by the shooting industry each year. Recently, Nicholas Milton, author of new book The Secret Life of the Adder[9], raised the impact of the game birds in several interviews with the BBC. Tim Bonner[10], the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, has since complained, arguing that the link between pheasant populations and adder declines is ‘unjustified on the basis of the evidence’.
Hand admits that the impact of pheasants upon adders remains largely anecdotal, but he has witnessed the game birds attacking snakes and retrieved adders that have been pecked to death.
Adders are particularly vulnerable when they are breeding. Female adders can carry up to 12 babies inside them, each around the size of a pencil, and so are sluggish and unable to properly defend themselves. While adders have been known to live as long as 27 years, most, according to Hand, will only survive a single breeding season.
One of the longest-living snakes he has monitored was a female he nicknamed ‘Raven’ because of a marking on her head that resembled a silhouette of the bird. She lived close to his hometown of Ledbury, and Hand estimates she could have been around 15 years old. He monitored her for a decade or so – but one day discovered her body under a sheet of metal, where she had been stamped to death. ‘I collected up her body and buried her,’ he recalls, quietly. ‘You do get attached to snakes.’
There are places in Britain where adders and people manage to co-exist. On Hounslow Heath, a 200-acre west London green space, a population of snakes resides somewhere in the scrub. In 2017, a 27-year-old father of two was hospitalised after being bitten by an adder while picnicking with his children in the park, but the vipers still remain in situ.
The Northamptonshire village of King’s Cliffe is another where the locals are embracing adders. Charles Tomalin, 63, who is part of a community group called Wildplaces, says they have worked with local landowners to clear patches for adders to bask, and to link different habitats together to improve the overall population of snakes, which he estimates is around 40. He says the local primary school is also educating children about the presence of the vipers.
There have been two incidents of dogs being bitten around the village in recent years, the last happening a month or so ago, but on both occasions the animals recovered. Tomalin says adders have not been universally welcomed into the village, with pointed comments on the local Facebook group, although overall he detects a growing acceptance. ‘We have a creature that is rare and endangered in this country and I think we have a duty to protect that sort of biodiversity around the village,’ he says. ‘They are part of the landscape and we should live with it.’
Nowadays, adders are protected from deliberate persecution under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act
Credit: Marsha Arnold for The Telegraph
During the research of his adder book, Milton says he witnessed first hand the divisiveness engendered by adders. On one occasion in the Malverns, he encountered a middle-aged and middle-class woman walking her dog who freely admitted to him she was searching out any adders in the immediate landscape to kill. The snakes, she argued, posed too much of a threat to her dog and had no right to be there.
‘We are heading towards a time when there will be nothing left in the countryside that in any way threatens us,’ Milton says.
But when our adders ultimately disappear, he argues, we also shed an important part of our own identity. ‘I think we will have lost something very important, that makes up part of our Britishness and who we are.’
References
- ^ adders (part of the viper family) (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ many experts claim that the snake could all but disappear from much of the countryside within the next decade or so (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ red squirrels (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ hedgehogs (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ Adders 1 (cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ pheasants (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ crows (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ tick-borne diseases (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ The Secret Life of the Adder (books.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ Tim Bonner (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ Adders 2 (cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk)