THE REPTILES
THE
REPTILES
OF
SUFFOLK.
OF
BY EDWIN J .
209
SUFFOLK.
ROPE.
THE Efts, Frogs and Toads of our County are in good case, on account of their aquatic-spawning habits. It is only too true that our river-courses and their ramificating dyke-systems are constantly dwindling, unless locked ; at the best the fall is negligible and the lack of a foot's depth by drought becomes a serious matter over wide areas. But the heavy Boulder-clay capping High Suffolk and, at such places as it outcrops, the even Stifter London-clay will ever maintain a water-supply ample for the survival of our few remaining species of Batrachians. On the other hand, all our true Reptiles have very appreciably decreased in distribution during the last Century, and with persistent celerity. In particular the Grass Snake, Viper and Slow-worm are to be no longer traced in very many haunts that they frequented with comparative abundance hardly thirty years ago. The face of our county is undergoing such abominably radical changes, at first by a " high " system of farming that entails razing of bushes and felling of shade-trees, enclosure of wastes with stubbing of their broomy and furzy cover; later drainage of wild marshlands ; and now utter rural sophistication to the ridiculous adulation of motor traffic, that most of its features have become so modified as to be unfitted for these specialised creatures' natural environment. Against this we can set little beyond the precarious shelter afforded by rail-road cuttings and bankments which may, despite their barbarous periodic burnings, help to retard though they cannot avert the ultimate extermination of these and too many other persecuted representatives of the British fauna. All our feral species occur also in Cambridgeshire (Handbook to Nat, Hist. Cambs. 1904, by Dr. Hans Gadow); in Essex, excepting the Natterjack (Mammals and Reptiles of Essex, by Dr. Henry Laver); and in Norfolk, whence the Edible Frog does not appear to have been recorded (Trans. Norf. Nat. Soc. 1871, P- 81), though it has there occurred. Unfortunately William Kirby, F.R.S., though possessing a comprehensive knowledge of Reptiles (Bridgewater Treatise 1835, ii, pp. 414-35), left nothing relating to his own County on the subject. The following List deals with four classes of records :—(1) The truly British Reptiles which alone are herein numbered and have now dwindled, largely through mcdiasval superstitious intolerance doubtless, to so small a band that not only is the whole of them noticed for future investigation but (2) additional, introduced, ones are inserted in order to avoid their confusion. Other of our species have (3) drifted by quite natural agencies to our shore; änd (4) certain kinds, once indigenous, are now known merely in their fossil condition. The names of those that yet, or certainly did once, exist in a feral State in Suffolk are italicised.