All Going Smoothly
Last week’s article focussed on a real passion of mine, snakes. For all you ophidiophobes I apologise, as it is once again to this group which I turn in this week’s column.
Heathland is a habitat which is globally rarer than rainforest. Typified by low ericaceous shrub growth, dominated by heather and gorse, heaths are the most amazing man-made wildlife feature of the northern hemisphere. Woodbury castle is a very good symbol of man’s influence in this particular biotope.
Before the discovery of metal, and its implications for tool making, deforestation of the ancient wild wood which once covered the British Isle was a slow affair, hampered by the flint tools and the nomadic lifestyle of hunter gatherers. However, during the Iron Age, people settled to live in communities and trees were felled at an increasing rate. On areas of acid soil, removal of the woodland canopy and grazing of livestock produced the conditions in which what we now think of as lowland heath, thrived.
I mention this as I am sure not all of you managed to make it along to Heath Week 2009 and so might have missed this salient point about this fabulous habitat. For all the heathland’s importance for biodiversity, it is for one group in particular which I particularly value them, as it is the only habitat in Britain to support all six species of reptile.
As far as lizards go we have three: Slow worms, the legless lizard commonly encountered in wilder gardens through the District; common lizards – less common than their name suggests but still found throughout East Devon; sand lizards, very rare but expanding thanks to conservation efforts.
Snakes, again three: grass snakes are often found in association with water and are sometimes seen near garden ponds; adders tend to specialise on heaths and coastal grassland but are relatively common in the District; smooth snakes, extinct in Devon for the last 50 years.
However, smooth snakes have been given a helping hand recently, thanks to a project to reintroduce Britain’s rarest reptile to the pebblebed heaths between the RSPB and the charity, Amphibian and Reptile Conservation.
Smooth snakes are a tiny grey snake, totally harmless to people, which has suffered historical declines through habitat loss and persecution. Their diet consist mainly of lizards, with a few small mammals taken also, and this specialist diet means they only thrive where lizards thrive too. Loss of heathland habitat, especially in the 60s, 70s and 80s when it was a habitat viewed as prime development land across much of its expanse, also hastened this little snake’s demise.
Once isolated the smooth snake, which seldom grows over 60 centimetres in length, struggles to recolonise new locations and so finds itself trapped on certain sites. Currently if you wanted to meet a smooth snake you would have had to visit a Dorset or Hampshire heath, and cross your fingers as they are incredibly difficult reptiles to see being both small and very secretive.
However, in a project which will run for several years, individual snakes from stable populations in other counties are being collected and relocated in East Devon, to attempt to establish a breeding population here once again. Ten individuals have been released in 2009 and this number will be added to next year, so as not to deplete populations elsewhere in an attempt to re-establish them here.
This is great news, as not only will it mean the UK’s only constrictor will be living here in Devon once again, but that the diversity of our heathland fauna is extended a little further and our deleterious actions of the last 50 years are being counteracted at long last.
The chances of stumbling across one of the ten pioneers is so fantastically remote as to make it realistically impossible, but I will keep you posted on the progress of these snakes as they set up home in the County over the coming years and who knows, perhaps one day we will be familiar with their lithe shapes sliding through the heather?