NEWS AND STAR (Carlisle, UK) 22 May 06 Adders are subtracted from Cumberland Gap (Ross Brewster)
Fifty snakes in the Carlisle area are about to be rescued to stop them becoming homeless when work to upgrade the Cumberland Gap begins.
The adders – Britain’s only poisonous breed of snake – live close to the verges of the A74 between Carlisle and Gretna and face having their habitat swallowed up by the £174.61 million project to turn the dual-carriageway into motorway.
So environmentalists are picking them up one by one and taking them to a new home at Matterdale Forest between Keswick and Ullswater.
Dr Warren Cresswell, of environmental consultants Cresswell Associates, said: “The adder population near the A74 is an important one, so a high priority has been placed on finding them a new home.
“We had to look far and wide to find a suitable habitat where there was not already a healthy population of the snakes.
“Matterdale Forest was chosen because a large area of forest has recently been felled, which helps to make it a particularly good habitat for adders.
“The snakes have only started to fully emerge from hibernation over the last few weeks, enabling us to start the process of moving them to their new location.”
Forestry Commission staff at Matterdale are creating special habitats for the Cumberland Gap adders to ensure they feel at home.
This includes creating a hibernaculum – made from logs and stones buried underground – where the snakes can shelter when it gets too cold and hibernate during the winter.
Although adders are poisonous they are not aggressive. No-one has died from an adder bite in Britain for more than 20 years and most people who have been bitten were handling the snakes.
Easily recognisable from a distinct dark zig-zag running down the length of its spine and an inverted ‘V’ shape on its neck, the snakes can grow up to 75 centimetres in length and have been known to live as long as 30 years.
Those being moved to Matterdale will be individually recorded so experts can monitor how they cope with the move. The forest’s small mammal population will also be studied to ensure the adders have been taken there in viable numbers.
Work on the long-awaited upgrade to the notorious 5.8-mile Cumberland Gap bottleneck is to start in July and be completed by 2008.
The project will stretch from junction 44 of the M6 at Carlisle’s Greymoorhill interchange to Guard’s Mill at the start of the A74(M), just south of the Scottish border.
Adders are subtracted from Cumberland Gap

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