Adder in the snow
Snow returned to Assynt on 6th March 2023, blanketing the landscape down to sea level. This was followed by some quite cold nights (down to -5 deg C). It did not begin to thaw until the night of 11th-12th, and returned briefly on 14th.
It kept some of us at home, but provided others with great opportunities for photography. On 9th, Chris Puddephatt walked up the Kirkaig River to Fionn Loch to get some shots of Suilven. The path around the peninsula in NC1217 provided a good vantage point (photo 1), with the bonus of two golden eagles flying around Cnoc na Circe to the north.
He also noticed, at NC12031771, ‘a patch of wiggles’, starting at one clump of grass and disappearing into another (photo 2). The sinuous tracks had no other signs nearby, human or otherwise, and were the right width for him to think ‘insomniac adder’.
Early emergence of adders
The next day he emailed the photos to Andy Summers and myself, setting us thinking in turn. I checked our adder records and found two old ones just across the waters of Fionn Loch in NC1218, one by M.F. Clarke in July 1973, the other by Ian Murray of Pollan in August 1982. Andy also remembered Pippa Saunders telling him that she frequently saw adders on the upper parts of the Kirkaig path, when she lived at Inverkirkaig in the 1990s and regularly ran up to Fionn Loch.
I wondered how early in the year adders emerged and found the answer in one of the older works on my bookshelves. The British Amphibians and Reptiles by Malcolm Smith (1954) in the New Naturalist series held the key. This has great discursive accounts of the natural history of the species with, on p.246, a paragraph on the spring emergence of adders (photo 3). On the strength of all this information, Andy and I agree with Chris that what he saw were adder tracks in the snow, a first for Assynt.
In passing, this observation reminds us how important it is to report sightings of our three local reptiles, adder, slow-worm and common lizard. They may be widespread, but information on their local distribution and habits is still very patchy. So let us know if you ever come across them, with photos of both the creatures and their habitat, if possible, and a grid reference.
Ian M. Evans