NHF excursion 2007

I'm a member of Norsk Herpetologisk Forening - NHF - the organization for reptile enthusiasts in Norway. We go on an excursion every spring, to look for herptiles in the wild. There are eleven species of herptiles and amphibians that are native to this country.

(This post is obviously related to my wish to photograph turtles in the wild (or semi-wild) as expressed in the previous post. :-)

Last year we didn't get to see very many of the different species - the weather wasn't too great - but I did take a few good pictures.

We came across one hoggorm - Vipera berus, the one poisonous viper we have in this country - which was attempting to bask in such sun as there was that day.

She was a female and one of the guys, P, who knows a lot about the native Norwegian snakes, palpated her for eggs, which it turned out she was in fact carrying. Cool. :-)

She wasn't too thrilled to have us there and did her best to to chase us off.

We also saw a stålorm - Anguis fragilis - which is not a snake, but a legless lizard. But I didn't get any pictures of that which were good enough to post here, to be honest. (It wasn't a very impressive specimen anyway. ;-)

However ...

... one of our esteemed members had had the foresight to bring another snake with him! LOL! He had caught it in his neighborhood earlier and brought it with him (in a sock!) to release it during the excursion. Just because. :-)

This was a buorm - Natrix natrix - an entirely harmless and very pretty snake. A juvenile specimen.