smooth snake conditions

[Ulrich Schulte]

ilHello everyone,

yesterday we had some excellent smooth snake weather conditions here around Trier, I guess. Temperature about 23°C at 5 pm, light rain, cloudy, very high humidity and about 2 hours allways between rainy and partly sunny. So I went searching for smooth snakes for one hour and found four individuals. Here are the pictures.

Greetings, Ulli

[Daniel Kane]

Nice snakes Ulrich; the habitat looks lovely. Which other species do you see there, perhaps muralis and bilineata?

[Ulrich Schulte]

Thanks Daniel,

indeed the habitat is very nice and hopefully these old walls will last a long time. Other species which can be found are P. muralis, although in low numbers and A. fragilis. Unfortunately L. bilineata is missing.

[Peter Oefinger]

Very nice - it seems that Coronella isn't so rare, you just need the right weather conditions.

[Ulrich Schulte]

Hi Peter,

I think so and had in mind that Coronella might be a "bad weather" snake, that shows high activity shortly before rain showers. The advantage of this habitat is that I can be there searching in some minutes, thus reacting flexible to the weather conditions. This might be a problem at other more distant sites, when the time slot of observable activity is rather short.

[Tomas Klacek]

Hi,
same experiences. Last year I discovered a population of smooth snakes about 300m far of our cottage. I have walked around entire life and had no idea about them. They go out in a very specific climatic conditions. I find them most during/after little summer rains, when temperature doesn't drop too much.