ENGLISH SNAKES 157 



ings, each cluster of eggs containing watched by the hour. They must be 



from twenty to thirty eggs. Then in the bracken. We have no option 



we pay a flying visit to the Norfolk but to follow, and as the growth is 



Broads, and there find only adders again, four "or five feet high it is no easy task 



sunning themselves on the banks or to force one's way through and at the 



walls of the marshes. Not a ring snake same time see the reptiles. Moreover 



to be seen here, though frogs abound ! the noise made by our movements 



Such is our experience of Hickling at scares the adders. By sheer good luck, 



I 



least and the immediate neighbour- however, we are successful at last, 

 hood. A number of fine sloughs are when almost giving up all hope. A 

 picked up on the marshes, these being large female is observed at a most 

 cast at intervals of six weeks or so from interesting moment, and later on she 

 spring to autumn. Our collection and her whole family, consisting of 

 for the four months now approaches thirteen young adders, measuring from 

 a hundred specimens of adders, killed six to seven inches in length at birth, 

 and preserved to study their varying are' caught, photographed, and'carried 

 sizes and colour variations, and our home in triumph. One of these young- 

 records show some three hundred ring sters, not more than a few minutes old, 

 snakes measured for their sizes and struck and used his fangs with all the 

 released as being perfectly harmless concentrated viciousness of his race, 

 and useful. but his supply of venom being yet 



We finish our season's snake-hunt- small no harm resulted, 

 ing by a return visit to Hereford in So we leave our snakes for another 

 early September, in the hope of encoun- winter's hibernation, well satisfied 

 tering some of the females previously that there is still plenty to see, study, 

 marked down, this time with their and observe in our English reptile 

 families. For days we meet with fauna, before all is known concerning 

 nothing but disappointment. Not one the life-history of these most interest- 

 is to be seen, though the old spots are ing and unduly despised creatures. 



