A wealth of wildife (2)

Reptile and Amphibian Group

Late spring and early summer are peak times for worried calls from those who fear encounters with adders. Adder bites are serious and merit an immediate trip to hospital but they are nowhere near as dangerous as you might think. With only a dozen adder-related deaths in the UK in the last hundred years (the last one in 1975), you should be much more fearful of lightning, bees, dogs, horses and, of course, people, all of which kill far more frequently.

But don't have nightmares! Cornwall has a special responsibility towards conserving this fascinating creature. If you know of a good adder site, or would like to join us in locating the best reptile populations in Cornwall, please give me a call.

Mark Nicholson

Bat Group

We have continued our survey of underground sites this winter. This means mainly old mine sites but also various underground tunnels which may have been built for storage or defence, such as smugglers' hidey holes and fogous. All of these sites have a stable temperature during the winter, averaging about 10°C, and are very suitable for bat hibernation. They are also used by hibernating insects, notably herald moths.

Another mild winter has meant no

surprises as far as records are concerned. It also means that bats have been able to spend most of the winter in shallow sites as they have not become too cold.

We have found several new sites for hibernating greater and lesser horseshoe bats, which show that they are well distributed throughout most of Cornwall. In winter, typically, there will be one or two bats in each small site and this is an indication of territorial behaviour by males holding the sites as mating roosts.

Daniel Eva

RIGS Group

First, we'd like to apologise if anyone did not hear we had postponed all the events in Science Week and turned up. We know people come from all over Cornwall for the events, whether in a museum or in the field; it's the nature of Cornwall's superb geological heritage that, for example, the lava at Cawsand is quite different to the lavas at Clodgy Point, St Ives, or on Mullion Island. Farmers are very good at letting us (and others, including student parties) tramp across their fields to look at rocks so it was a small sacrifice in return. We felt that coming to geological events hardly

counted as "essential journeys" when we could reschedule the programme. We tried to publicise the postponement widely and could only hope we could run them soon. And that is the situation as I write this in mid-March.

Now to turn to happier topics. We are delighted that Goonvean is leasing Tresayes Quarry to the Trust as a reserve. The quarry was formerly worked for the enormous feldspar crystals which were hand-picked and sent up-country for glass and glaze making. In fact the quarry was at one stage known as "The Glass Mine"! It's a spectacular piece of geology and it's near Roche, another impressive bit of geology, so I hope people will

go to see it. Obviously the reserves are all closed at the time of writing so it is impossible to say when this our second "geology" reserve will be open. But it is not only the geology which is worth seeing: it truly is a "nature" reserve.

St Erth Pits, our first geological reserve, was being surveyed by Camborne School of Mines when foot-and-mouth restrictions curtailed this. A topographical survey of the whole pit was a priority identified in the management plan.

John Macadam

The most spectacular sightings reported to Seaquest recently included beached remains of a forty-foot sperm whale (above) at Gorran Haven. Turtle records included a rare loggerhead and two even rarer Kemp's ridleys, all in the Newquay area. The huge leatherback turtle, which is "common" in our waters by comparison, is very much a part of our marine conservation plans. Give us a call if you would like to join Seaquest's network of Coastal Rangers. Photo: Anne Williams