Snakes from Finland!

[engywook]

The field season has started again, which gives me a great opportunity to take pictures of Finnish wildlife. We only have three species of snake here (one of which actually only lives on the Åland Islands), which makes it easy to cover "the snakes of Finland" in a single post. So here are some snakes from the Frozen North!

Here is one of the two grass snakes (Natrix natrix) living under/around our lab/office. The picture is from last summer; we saw them again last week sunning themselves in the field with three new little ones! Yay!



I ran into this common viper (Vipera berus berus) sunning itself at one of our collection sites. I've been told (and read) that their venom can be quite painful but is rarely lethal (barring allergy). Last year I saw a black individual somewhere near the field station, but I didn't get a picture....hopefully he/she will show up again.

[frankykeno]

How wonderful to get to see your pictures. Please post more as I'd love to see Finland (both animals and land).

[tigerlily]

That grass snake has a very unusual looking head, and the viper is just cool! Is the grass snake flattening out it's head or it is just shaped that way? Thank you for sharing.

[engywook]

I'm glad you're enjoying the pics.

That's the way the grass snake's head normally looks. They're quite beautiful; the yellow patches vary in shade and intensity -- they're useful for identifying individuals.

Here are some more herp pics; I've also got landscape pics, but I'll have to dig those up & post them later, since I'm supposed to be working now. Without further ado, Lacerta vivpara, one of the two native lizards. This is the most common reptile in Finland. As the name indicates, they give birth to live young. Actually, all of the Finnish reptiles except the grass snake are viviparous.

A pair of L. vivipara I found hibernating under a rock last field season:


And a wandering individual I found near the boats this year:


I'll put up some landscapes (summer, fall and winter) later, I promise!

[Shelby]

Wow very cool.. nice to see species we don't hear often about. I really like the grass snake.. and that viper has some cool orange looking eyes.

[engywook]

Sorry for the delay in posting more pictures. Field work is a great deal of fun, but the early part of the season involves 15-hour workdays, so I'm quite busy.

Here's a sunrise picture I took from the station at about 4.40am last May:



And here is the actual station itself, viewed from one of the islands:



A wood ant mound (it's big, but I've seen bigger ones since):



A tree scarred by lightening:



A couple of wintertime pictures from Nuuksio National Park (the foreground in the second one is a frozen lake):





A few more from the same park during autumn (Finland really is gorgeous at just about any time of year):





And, finally, I have to post a picture of a swamp, since that's where the country got its name:

[Alice]

Beautiful landscape pics! What's the temps like at different seasons in the year? Also, what is the "station"?


Thanks

[engywook]

Sorry! "The station" is Tvärminne Zoological Station, where I do my fieldwork in the summer. Here on the southern coast, the temperature ranges from +25C in summer to -25C in winter (Google tells me that's 77F to -13F) and daylength varies between 17 hours in June and about 5 hours in December. At the extremes, though, it never really gets dark (or light, depending), you just get a few hours of dusk/dawn.

It's quite a beautiful country with a remarkable people; I'm thoroughly enjoying my time here!