RAUK - Archived Forum - Herps in bak garden.

Hi Andy, seems like you have an ideal situation to study some of the great unknowns!

I would love to know if viviparous lizards have a distinct home range or show any form of site fidelity. The small number that can be seen in our garden can disappear for months on end, only to then return again to their favourite basking spots. I'm not sure if anyone has ever studied their seasonal movements. I'm also not sure if our garden residents are actually moving to somewhere else or if it is a case that they are not easily observed in our garden during some months of the summer. This might be a good project for using a mark/recapture techniques such as photo ID.

I'm sure other forum members can come up with some other suggestions and help out with methodology. 

Slow-worms are probably the least studied of all our native reptiles, seems like a good opportunity to do some longterm study, for instance does recruitment occur from outside of your garden or is it a self-sustaining population?

So come on peeps, lets have some more suggestions for a project for Andy whilst we are waiting for the sun to rise a little higher at midday

Hi! Andy.  I'm the one who kicked off that Reptiles'n'Railways topic, & boy, am i envious of those like you who get plenty of reptiles naturally occuring in their back gardens. From the sound of it you could almost forget you were in Britain & not somewhere in the Med!..So, where are you then, Andy?..I'm presuming somewhere along the south coast.

All i can really suggest to further improve your gardens attractiveness to reptiles is to keep the area of your garden closest to the railway nice'n'wild lookin' & well open to the sun...Have some compost heaps there, some piles of old wood'n'dead branches, the odd pile of rocks, or bricky ruble, some junk, maybe a few car mats'n'tyres, etc..Basically keep that end of your garden a bit of a mess! Put a pond in there & you'll also likely get amphibians & the odd Grass snake too!

Anyway, all the best, Andy.

Mick.   

Andy,

I have replied to you on the 'Slow-Worm' thread which i had inadvertently put the original message on, but is it the railway line which runs from London to High Wycombe which you are referring to?

I knew the railway banks well around Gerrards Cross 30 odd years ago, and there were lots of Common Lizards and Slow-Worms then, and a few Grass Snakes as well. Not surprisingly, with the railway running East-West, most of the reptiles were on the sunny South-facing side!

Cheers,

Mike Brown

Andy,

Don't give up on the grass snakes. I live in an East Devon town and we get occasional grass snakes in the gardens here - mine have turned up in my compost heaps.Another found one under a piece of discarded corrugated tin (classic!). Some that are seen are quite large. They use a sunken stream and its banks to travel along and then slip into the gardens from there. Older neighbours say that years ago there were a lot more grass snakes iin the gardens as the bottom of the gardens near the stream were pretty rough but now there is a lot more neat lawns. Fortunately we have large gardens and some are still wildish so we do get them. I have lots of slow worms - over 30 - in my garden in the compost bins where they breed and hibernate. We don't have any lizards though - you are so lucky.

I had given up on seeing a grassy in our garden, then this little one showed up last summer . We are in a rural part of Essex, though mostly arable fields, it seems that grass snakes and lizards are still  holding their ground along the hedgerows and in the margins of the occassional grazing paddocks around here. We only need an adder in the garden now to complete a full house of all four widespread native reptiles.. well I can always dream can't I  and the famous Essex coastal adders are not so far away

I also caught a glimpse of largish adult grassy in October basking in the marginal vegetation of our pond.. no sign afterwards though of a large female common frog that had turned up a few days before .. but that's life I guess. I really do hope that grass snakes will use our purpose built compost heap as an egg laying site.

Andy, have you tried putting down pre-prepared sheets of tin or roofing felt to help you survey the reptiles in your garden? Grass snakes can be extremely elusive and appear far more mobile than the other widespread species.. there are sites I've surveyed where though grassies were known to to be present in reasonable numbers it took a great deal of effort to confirm it.

Andy.  Both Gemma's pic' & yours look fine to me,..well done! Anyway, forgive me for presuming you were likely to be somewhere along the south coast but i just thought the numbers of reptiles you were talking about in your garden meant you were almost surely way down south somewhere. I'm thrilled i was wrong though, to know you get that many lizards in your garden, yet you're situated north of the capital & nowhere near the coast! I've no doubt the railway at the bottom of your garden's got a lot to do with it though, because as i've said elsewhere, railways are like ideal reptile distribution motorways. And coincidentally, i'm also along your Marylebone route, living in Banbury, & it's places along that line towards Bicester (& at places along the line towards Oxford) where i annually check up on colonies of railway reptiles i know of. And no, certainly still don't give up on seeing a Grass snake, because besides that species very much existing around The Chilterns & in south Buck's, there's good numbers of them along this end of your railway route.

Mick.