Happy new herping season everyone! (I know its been on for long, but what the heck ).
I wanted to share this image from yesterdays observations with you. At the time it had been snowing quite heavily for around 5 minutes, but this berus male did not seem to care. Eventually he moved away, but its still one of my most unusual observations so far. By the way, all the snow in the image came from the snowfall in the last 5 minutes. The airtemperature was around -1°C at the time of observation.
Another adder was laying in the snowstorm aswell, but cared less about moving away and tucked into the leaflitter, where it was a bit more safe from the wind.
Before the snowstorm I was able to observe an overall of 6 adders in light snowfall, that of course had been accompanied by a couple of sunrays every now and then.
Its so crazy, yet fascinating to see how resistent these snakes seem to be towards extreme weather and temperatures!
Vipera berus in a snowstorm by Lennart Schmid, auf Flickr