The year has officially begun

Now it is official - 2012 has started! :-)
Yesterday I joined Boris and Igor at doing fieldwork on Vipera berus (Common Adder / Kreuzotter). Goal was to catch as much snakes as possible, measure and weight them and also collect data about where they've been found, certain temperatures and information about the (micro-)habitat. With that it's possible to gain information about how big the population is, how much the single snakes move, how fast they grow, temperature preferences and so on.
At the beginning, the catch rate looked pretty much like a typical austrian national team vs. anyone football match: Cro - A 4:0. I was quite proud of myself, being such a good representative of our football culture even in herpetolgy. But in the end i also found a black male, even though i tried my best to avoid finding a snake ;-)
So the searching is the fun part, after that the snakes have to be measured, what is a bit tricky, because snakes usually don't like being  handled and the fact that V. berus is poisonous doesn't make things easier. So this is quite a task and gets even harder when a new snake is found, because then you have to make a complete inventory of the animal, which includes counting lots of scales.