New snake discovery

Fascinating!

Interesting - much like eels go out to sea and return to their "home ground" for breeding.

When I was a child I caught an eel in the local river - 30 miles from the sea and not even on a main river. Nature is wonderful and mysterious.

Ooh, nice! Bet that was fun!

It was ! Literally on a bent pin and a stick. My friend's grandfather had it for his tea.

Did you go all expert fisherman and weigh it?

It was weighed! somehow. it was all covered in a sort of glue so impossible to handle, I think we caught it in a bag and weighed it on a spring-scale. It weighed 1lb 5oz OK not huge, but it weighed a ton on the end of my stick (I was 10 years old).

That's bigger than anything I've ever caught! Biggest thing I've caught is a large crayfish, I think!

Well done! did you eat it?

No, I put it back. We were relocating crayfish from a river on my course.

Ah river crayfish, no I don't think they're edible. I used to catch those too, in my hands, when I was young (couldn't touch one now!). I believe that these days there are bigger American (?) crayfish in our rivers which are interlopers and are hazardous to our native river ecology, but I could be wrong.

Yeah, the Signal Crayfish. They swamp out our native ones.

Wouldn't eat it, even if I was allowed! Eurgh!

Guessing those weren't amongst the ones you rescued then.

No, these ones were regular old UK-native ones! Still pinchy though!