The French grass snake

My summer holiday this year involved a visit to the lovely French countryside. Best of all, a sun-baked barn in the place we were staying had become the final resting place of a very large grass snake (Natrix natrix), reduced to mostly skin and bone by the time we left. I toyed with the idea of taking the whole thing back but was wisely convinced to just snip the head off. I wrapped it in kitchen roll, taped it securely into part of an egg box and managed to get it home unscathed via three trains and a metro.

For the next few weeks I had the fun job of cleaning away the remaining mummified tissue and reassembling the skull and some cervical vertebrae. Some little palatal bones were damaged already, and tragically I snapped one with a vacuum cleaner and never found the end, but overall it's quite intact. I left the cervical ribs and some loose teeth out because they were SO fiddly, perhaps to try again one day. She* now sits proudly on my little nature shelf at home, in a perfectly-sized sputum collection vial never used for its intended purpose.

(A, left lateral; B, dorsal; C, ventral; D, posterior; E, anterior views from a slightly shaky photographer)

The holiday spot turned out to be a great place for snakes. I even managed to catch a little one by leaping at it Irwin-style, but immediately felt very sorry for it while it writhed around and ineffectually tried to bite me. It quickly went back into the wall. I hope the locals are kinder to their lovely reptiles.


*Wikipedia tells me that male grass snakes only get to about 50cm long, so at about a metre, mine was certainly a lady.