Tag Archives: Snakes

Pyrenees flora and fauna book

New Pyrenees wildflower and fauna guidebook in English

This superb Pyrenees nature and wildlife guide is now available to order from the Hike Pyrenees website – click here for details.

A superb new book on Pyrenees wildlife in English has been published and is a must for any nature lover visiting the Pyrenees. This is very welcome as Pyrenees specific books on flora or fauna in English were nearly impossible to come by before.

Wildlife of the Pyrenees guidebook

What’s even better is that this a fantastic guide with 910 species illustrated. What I really like is that the guide covers a bit of everything with sections on flora, birds, snakes, lizards, insects, mammals, fish, trees, mushrooms and butterflies. There are even a couple of pages on the main livestock species found here so you can now identify the cows, sheep and horses that you see while out hiking too! It really is a great all round guide.

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Snakes in the Pyrenees

Ian a regular reader of the blog recently sent me a couple of photos of some snakes he’d seen on the French side of the Pyrenees to identify.

Ian's mystery snake

Ian’s mystery snake

He’d found a lovely example of a green whipsnake. It’s a long thin snake which can rach up to 2 metres but is usually quite a bit shorter than this around 1 to 1.5 metres.

You can find them across most of southern Europe and like warm scrub covered areas. I don’t come across these very often but when I do they often stay perfectly still and then shoot off very fast. The name whipsnake is for the speed of their movement. They’re non-venemous so there was no need to worry Ian!

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