Week Three – Adders

This week, Bill and his fellow wildlifers re-house an entire population of adders and common lizards in Cumbria which were doomed to homelessness by the creep of highway development.

The team arrive on site at a section of the A74 that is a real accident black spot. The road is to be widened from four lanes to six to reduce the number of accidents. But this work will destroy the existing verges which have become home to a large number of adders and common lizards.

Bill, Dusty, Sasha and Jem devise a strategy to save these increasingly rare reptiles, but soon discover that there are very few suitable sites for adders adjacent to their current home.

A local peat moss site a little further up the road turns out to be suitable for the common lizards, but as it already has its own population of adders, it would be unwise to introduce newcomers. Jem gets to work on a one-way lizard bridge to corral the reptiles into their new home and keep them there.

The rest of the team plan an operation to catch and translocate the adders to a site several miles away. First they have to check that the new site has sufficient adder food. Then Jem must build a suitable frost-free hideaway to house the snakes over winter.

Then comes the crunch. Bill must face his demons and join the adder capture party. Who will be more stressed, Bill or the snakes?

Both Bill and the snakes are hugely relieved as the animals slither away to freedom into their new winter hibernaculum.

See the story in pictures in the gallery.