This time last year I saw a personal best of 14 female adders (Vipera berus) during one visit at my local site. However, in ideal conditions today I only saw two. Why? Well, turns out the severe floods on Boxing day completely inundated the site. Having spoken with some residents in the areas I can estimate that well over half of the adder site was several feet under water during the floods. This was already evident in early spring when several regular males were nowhere to be seen. In the end a grand total of 3 males have been observed at the site this year. My monitoring of females usually starts around June and although they have always outnumbered the males at this particular site the results today were very worrying. Here’s hoping some where merely washed away to other areas and that they didn’t all drown. Furthermore, I have found two killed females already this year at the site, one likely by cattle and the other which was hard to tell.
