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So I am not in the shed. I am in the garden, but next to a main road, so apologies if there's traffic. And,
bit of an impromptu video because my neighbors just next door called me up just now they said
Sally - we've got something
we think you might want to see in the garden.
And I've obviously got a bit of a reputation around village because they got me a snake.
Now handling snakes is very dangerous and only should be done by trained professionals.
Luckily I have been trained so I should get it for you now.
Here it is.
Ahh, its tiny! It's my tiny little grass snake. It's so cute.
So the grass snake is one of three snakes in the uk although there is also one legless lizard
We've got the grass snake here
which is the biggest and
This tiny little fellow which I reckon is only about a year old this can grow up to about 1 meter 10
at it's very biggest and we have had some massive ones like that in the garden
But that's an extreme normally they're around 70, 80 centimeters. The most striking feature about grass snakes
Is that they've got a yellow band that runs all the way around their neck. If you see one of these it's most likely going
to be a grass snake
Although not all grass snakes have them. It's mostly an olive green to brown but it can be much darker.
And it has some black spots along the back. The name grass snake is actually a bit of a misnomer.
So the latin for grass link is Natrix Natrix from the latin
'Natare' meaning to swim and
This is much better name because they love to swim.
Their main food is frogs and toads — in fact the vast majority of their diet is amphibians.
This tiny little thing will probably eat tadpoles, he's not big enough to grab a frog.
You can also get smooth snakes which are really rare,
unlike this one, the most common snake. And then there's probably the most famous snake in the UK, the adder, famous because it is
venomous. Venomous is when it hurts you if it injects into the bloodstream as opposed to poisonous
Which is when it hurts you if you eat it.Very unlikely to bite you because it's much more likely to run away
It's very good at detecting vibrations. So when you put your big heavy foot down on the ground
It'll be gone before you even knew it was there, and I haven't actually seen an adder in the wild,
which is very sad really. Adders also greeny-brown same sort of size, 70,80 cm at normal adult size.
But these usually have prominent diamond markings down the back of them
But a fail safe way to tell the difference between an adder and a grass snake is that the grass snake has
circular pupils whereas an adder has vertical pupils think a vertical pupils.
Think vertical like evil eye sort of thing.
Although as most of my friends say when I tell them this fact:
'I don't want to be close enough to be able to see the pupil if I don't know if it's an adder or not'.
Grass snakes don't bite you, but they can either be beautifully behaved like this one or
they can play dead which is common defence against predators.
Most predators don't like to eat already dead or
rotting meat because it has bacteria, like why we wouldn't want to eat rotten meat - it would make them ill.
So they tend to not eat dead thing so by playing dead —
And this can do it really realistically it lies on its back,
opens its mouth and then even spews up blood from its nose in its mouth to make it really realistic and that way predators don't eat it.
The grass snakes other defense mechanism is to vent. So if you don't know what venting is well
It's really unpleasant. When I've had some quite substantially larger grass snakes do this to me in the past
they will grab onto your hand and
defecate but it's not just a normal poo. It's this kind of white
Liquidy pooh that really stinks. The official term is it's a garlicky strong smell,
but it's horrible, if it gets on your hands. It's so hard to get off it goes
everywhere because not only do they just vent — they are literally venting their insides
onto you
they will spin their tail around in helicopter form just to make sure that the poo flies
everywhere and that you get completely covered from head to toe. So good defense
strategy because no one likes to eat a smelly poohy snake. This snake here tried to vent on me a little bit
but he's too small so my hands smell a little bit of garlic.
Actually, they don't smell that bad anymore.
So now it's time to put him back. I hope you learned a lot about grass snakes and
muah
ahh, his tongue flickered. Keep smiling. 🎶 Shed Science Theme 🎶