Sloworm!
Sloworm!
Lovely. Looks like it's having fun in the custom-made water park
Awesome! :-)
Great photos, nicely captured (especially exiting the pond). Looks like an idyllic garden you have, lovely.
[Reminds me of one of our French holidays, I regularly swam for an hour or so in our gite pool, and would often have at least a few snakes in with me for company.]
Grass snake
It's a grass snake Peter - beautiful creature.
You have a lovely pond there.
Cheers,
Neil.
Brilliant spot! But, I’d be more concerned about the crocodile!
Thanks for the kind words guys. Yes, it's a banded Grass Snake and native to the UK. This one is around a metre long. Looking at the first photo it looks to have a bit of a bulge just above half way, (unless it's the angle I caught it at), so has probably eaten something - likely a Frog as I can't see any fish missing. Along with Goldfish and Koi there are also Rudd, Tench and Gudgeon and all seem to be there and are not perturbed by the Snake swimming round. As soon as it senses movement it makes a rapid dash to get behind the waterfall where it stays until it feels it's safe to venture out, (often 30 minutes to an hour later). When it does climb out of the pond it heads straight for the flower beds where I'm guessing it spends most of its time.
Hopefully I'll get more pictures.
Best Regards - Peter
I'd hate to be with you when you're on your own.
Haha. Great picture! That one sure looks realistic!
Nah, it's a slow worm. I should know, my father used to breed them for a living.
I picked this little fella (he was about 1m long) out of a skip earlier this year
It was on a project at London Zoo so I was not 100% sure what sort of serpent he or she was but I did not want to see it going to the tip, so I did my best Steve Irwin impression and grabbed him behind the head and pulled him out. We notified the zoo but they were not interested as nothing had escaped, so it was left to me to pick him up.
All the lads on site ran an mile from him. It was quite cold so he has very docile.
Left to their own devices they can actually get quite large.
My son started his herpetological adventure with Slow worms and some as they got older were very sizeable.
I think I have seen virtually every breed of snake around my house over the years.
He ended up as the largest Reticulated python (worlds longest snake) breeder in Europe with most stuff around 18 foot or more.
Cheers,
Neil.
Yeah the first is certainly a grass snake , the second although it has a similar colour to a slow worm it has the wrong head and tail and is about (Assuming 1m) twice the size that slow worms get so I'm not convinced
Note the blunt tail of the slow worm
Looks too big to be a slow worm. Could be a smooth snake or another grass snake.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
I thought it was a grass snake, which is why I was not to worried about picking it up. If it had been an escaped Taipan I might have thought differently.
I think it was too big to be a slow worm and looking at the distribution it is unlikely to be a smooth snake. Definitely not an Adder.
Beautiful.
Can confirm I would have screamed and ran away rather than getting photos.
And you sir are categorically right, but possibly unaware of the predilection of TZ members to identify anything organic and without wings as a slow worm. A search will throw up some seemingly imbecilic identifications, and hopefully the original post that started this peculiar response.