Bad weather ...

[Daniel Bohle]

...too bad for berus
...but not too bad for coronella

So I did a nice trip to some of my coronella places yesterday afternoon

[Daniel Bohle]

Well, also close to that one.
I flipped (so no picture) one under the same thing we found one 2007.

[Jürgen Gebhart]

...too bad for berus

Is this possible?????

How many Coronella`s do you found during that trip?

[Daniel Bohle]

> Is this possible?????
Not in spring - compared to coronella, but in summer - compared to coronalla

> How many Coronella`s do you found during that trip?
18 gravid females in around 4 hours.

[Andre Schmid]

18 gravid females in around 4 hours.

Really succesfull !

[Jürgen Gebhart]

Hmm, not bad!

I need just 4 or 5 years to find that number in my area!

Congrats!!!

[Bert Vandebosch]

18 adult Coronellas in 4 hours
That must be a record, they should put you in the guinness book.

Weather in Belgium seemed "bad" enough too lately to go out for Coronella. So I went for a search on saturday. I had to drive for an hour to reach the search site, to find that the sun was shining there the whole morning and there was a strong wind. I tried anyway and luckily by the time I almost wanted to give up, clouds came in and I found also a gravid female. Just 5 meters away from where I parked the car , the same animal that I found a few weeks ago at the same spot. Next time I hope to see some juveniles there. I think they will be early this year because of the extremely warm and dry spring in western europe.

After that I checked out another site on the way home. And just before it started to rain heavily, I found a male under a metal sheet.

Greetings

Bert

[Daniel Bohle]

Really bad weather since thursday, very frustrating so I simply took my raincoat, my bycicle and took the next train to coronella county.
Today there was 4.8mm of rain and 0,2 hours of "sunshine" - so beside the fact that I really get wet while searching I was quite successfull! Great weather ... can´t wait for the next rain

This was definitely worth to have a 1.5 hour drive back ... complete wet!

[Bobby Bok]

Great variaty!

[Daniel Bohle]

On thursday I was again looking for coronella. Unfortunately the weather was too good and a lot of sun came through the thin clouds. Then within a few minutes there came a hot summer rain. I just found 5 coronalle that day :-/

Yesterday the forecast was really bad (rain), but around 13:00 I noticed that this was wrong, nearly no rain so far!
So I drove to my berus area. When I arrived it was around 23°C, the gras was somehow wet, no rain, no sun ...but immediatly it startet to "rain".
The next hours the weather was changing every minute (5% sunshine, 5% rain, 10% soft rain, 30% really dark clouds, 50% snake hunting clouds
After around 3 hours of this crazy snake weather the sun came out and nearly all snakes disappeared...

Comparing the numbers I found yesterday with the average and record numbers of the last 5 years ( 22days in the field, for that area and early august ) I found:

333% of the average berus numbers
1000% of the average natrix numbers
385% of the average fragilis numbers

or

130 % of the record berus numbers
114 % of the average natrix numbers
71 % of the average fragilis numbers

so, to make a long story short, if you think its too bad for herping simply go out and try it....it´s worth the risk to fail!