Jon,

I would be interested in taking part. I live in Bath, and I'm a frequent visitor to the Purbeck area (but that is the most obvious herp site in the country, so you've probably already got it covered). How would the survey work? Do you assign a known hibernaculum, or does the volunteer need to locate one?

Richard 

Richard - said
'Jon,

I would be interested in taking part. I live in Bath, and I'm a frequent visitor to the Purbeck area (but that is the most obvious herp site in the country, so you've probably already got it covered). How would the survey work? Do you assign a known hibernaculum, or does the volunteer need to locate one?

Richard'

Hi Richard

Even though Purbeck is the most obvious herp site in the country this does not mean that monitoring is taking place on the more widespread species such as the adder.

I think we have some sites which have previously been monitored by Tony Phelps in this area and we are looking for people to visit these to carry on with monitoring.

However we would want to find sites closer to you if we can. I have previously set up transects for inexperienced herpers on sites I have worked on before and they managed to get good spring counts of adders over two years.

Once we have found these adder sites if they are properly recorded with data and grid references then we can pass on these for willing volunteers to carry out the same survey.

We have carried out impromptu experiments where we compared survey results between two different surveyors at the same adder site and found no difference in detectability. I was one of the lab rats on that site - being an experienced surveyor of that particular site.

We can run further testing of the methodology with further sites etc

You can always email me and we can discuss more about this

Jon