Are pheasants really eating our adders?

With gamebird releasing in the firing line for the UK's decreasing adder population, Graham Lorne wonders if the claims stack up

- Graham Lorne

I expect many of you will have read the Countryside Alliance (CA) news email circulated by the chief executive, Tim Bonner, entitled “Pheasants, adders and the BBC” last month. There have been several media reports proclaiming that adders are in severe decline in the UK, mainly prompted by Nicholas Milton, the author of a book on the snakes. In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the author suggested that “the release of 60 million pheasants that will kill adders” by UK game shoots was likely contributing to the decrease in the adder population. 

While promoting his new publication, Mr Milton also claimed that the adder will be “extinct across much of Britain in the next 15 to 20 years”, a worrying statistic indeed. However, this claim has been strongly refuted by the CA, along with several other associated claims made by the accomplished author.

I have spent a fair bit of time in the countryside during my life, either through working in agriculture, participating in country pursuits or just taking the kids (and later my grandchildren) on a quiet nature ramble. Yet my encounters with adders have been limited to a couple of occasions, on the same farm, when I was a schoolboy in the 1950s.

Even the smallest ‘two-horse farm’ still had a stackyard in the days when the corn was harvested with a binder and the sheaves then stored in stacks until the arrival of the threshing gangs in the autumn. The grain was then separated from the straw amid a lot of hard graft and it was while doing this in such a nearby stackyard that I got my first close-up view of adders.

Sizeable snakes