adders

Why watch adders?

Adders are among the easiest British animals to watch – if you can find them. It is very easy to walk past them, in spite of (or because of?) their strong patterns, because they are not always easy to see. They will often sit tight as people or dogs go by as little as a metre and a half away. Here are some adders pretending that they are not there, so they make pictures which are not very impressive –

Adder 1 Adder 2 Adder 3

You can sometimes walk past adders without disturbing them. What is more likely to disturb them is to stand and stare. Viewed from down on the ground you are a large dark shape against the sky. If you stay too long, adders may become uneasy and eventually slide away to their holes. Once you have found a good place for adders, and you have found out how to watch them without disturbing them, you can enjoy seeing some interesting behaviour. If you are patient, you will see things that you will never forget. It is probably as easy to see the life cycle of the adder as that of any other wild animal in Britain, apart from the frogs in your pond.

You can find a lot of interesting information about adders in books and web-sites, but there is nothing like making your own observations. Because adders are all individuals, and because all habitats are different in their geology, flora and detail, behaviours may differ quite widely, and unusual behaviour may be seen if you look often enough. Just because something is not mentioned in books, it does not mean that it is unimportant or that it did not happen: it simply means that authors can generally find space only for that which is reasonably typical.

Adders, like all other snakes, are descendants of four-legged animals, though no amount of external observation of adders will reveal any evidence of this. Even the adder’s name has evolved: in Old English it used to be called a nadder, which evolved into our version in Middle English.

The name of the newt has gone the other way – around the 15th century, an ewt became a newt. The biologists’ name for the adder – Vipera berus – has remained constant, though many others are subject to a sort of reverse evolution as biologists rediscover earlier authors. This can be rather confusing to gardeners, as well as to biologists. The official names are very useful if you go to another country, because they are used everywhere, whereas the common names can vary widely.

Note that although adders are deaf, they can sense vibrations in the ground very well, and they are very often aware of the presence of people before the people are aware of the presence of the adders. So tread carefully.