Snakes and adders

You know, when you are watching those wildlife films from the Serengeti, and you would wish that the camera person would climb off the Jeep and save the gazelle from the lions’ attack?

Well, it was a bit like that today. The architect drawing up the plans for the proper swimming pool and Gianluca had come round to discuss how we might progress things. It had been a hot day and was still hot although there was a small breeze blowing, what they call around here, un venticello.

While we were looking at the plans on the plot where the pool might one day go Luca, the architect, spotted something on the burnt out, bleached out lawn. It looked like one of those car roof elastic binders was stuck to the flower bed border. To our our horror we realised as we approached that it was not a roof tie but a snake with its mouth clasped tight around the hind quarters of a very large Italian toad.

What to do? Should we intervene and try and release the blooded toad or should we let nature run its bloody course?

In the end I fetched a spade and Luca,with great effort and perseverance, finally managed to sever the head from the snake in order that the toad could escape.

We had all feared that the snake was indeed venomous and a quite dangerous European viper.

When it was dead and the tail had finally stopped twitching my research on the Internet suggested that it was a swimming snake, natrix natrix or an natrice dal collare.

It was very sad to kill the snake and I think we all felt the worse for it.

This is a good site for Italian snake identification
https://funghimagazine.it/serpenti-ditalia-bisce-colubri-natrici/

Apparently these snakes, this one was about 94cm long, bite into a toad and weaken it until it’s efforts at inflating itself fail and the with all the gruesome jaw dislocating palaver they somehow ‘swallow’ it. It defies gravity and good manners but who are we to gainsay the victories and compromises of a long fought over evolution?