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Adder Reintroductions? |
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administrator
Admin Group Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Status: Offline Points: 10 |
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Sounds ideal Will, right habitat, historical population,
clear reason for extinction. Is there no chance at all of a surviving population or eventual recolinisation? |
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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Assuming the usual caveats, such as identification of why they went extinct and ensuring that this couldn't still be a factor, I'd love to see some of this to offset losses elsewhere. In London it looks impossible, since those areas which previously held adders are now wrecked beyond hope (eg Hampstead Heath ain't a heath any longer) or subject to regular people pressure - arson etc. However I'd like to see it done in the Bernwood Forest area of Oxfordshire/Bucks which used to have a great adder population a hundred years ago, persisting up to the 60's, when the Forest was planted with conifers. Since the 90's much of this has been felled and there are large tracts of rough grass, bramble, balckthorn, hawthorn etc and a few recovering Zv, Af and Nn populations in the forest - as well as being a top site for butterflies. All it's missing is a thriving adder population along the rides and in the glades..
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administrator
Admin Group Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Status: Offline Points: 10 |
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Just wondering at what point we should consider reintroductions of adder and the pros and cons. It's early days but NARRs seems to indicate a low rate of occupancy, which is no surprise, it wasn't all that long ago that one job of gamekeepers was to go and kill as many adder as they could at the hibernation sites. For sure I often find habitat that looks ideal but adder are absent, if we assume people were responsible for wiping them out, surely in 2011 we should now be thinking of putting them back again! If we assume what we see now is due to former persecution and can also assume that adder these days have better press (I'm more likely to find middle age couples these days looking for adder rather than trying to avoid them) how long until we consider a programme of national reintroductions? For sure monitoring existing sites is a priorty now (are they stable, is the decline for some other reason?), but I would be interested in thoughts on this. How could reintroductions be carried out? Captive breeding? Development translocations? Local translocation of young? If a project like this was to go ahead, who would be involved and fund it? |
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