PLAGUE OF ADDERS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3824, 21 October 1936, Page 6

PLAGUE OF ADDERS

IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. According to the papers, Ardnamurchan, Argyll, seems to be suffering from a "plague of adders” which is causing “concern” among stockholders, a cow having recently been fatally bitten. The writer adds that in that district the reptiles "attain a size unknown elsewhere in Britain." The last statement is interesting, for we are not aware that compara- • tive statistics on the subject have ever been prepared or published. We remember being shown a number of years ago a magnificent specimen of the true adder which was killed at Aberfoyle and stretched the tape to 36 inches. It was sent to London to be officially measured by the curator of the reptile department of the British Museum, and it was adjudged to be one of the largest ever secured in this country. In Ardnamurchan and along the west coast generally, the adders are seldom more than 27 inches long, and those from 18 to 24 indies are the most common. Certainly none of greater length than 28 inches has ever been reported from this area and the maximum is one that has only been reached once or twice in a generation. As to the "plague" of which we are told, we have it on the authority of the great Scottish naturalist, the late Mr J. A. Harvie Brown, that on one occasion well within living memory some estate workmen in Glendale, Skye, found 35 adult adders under a large stone which they had tc- turn while engaged in some buttforming operation. Their sizes were not extravagant, and even their group number was not unrivalled in Highland herpetology.