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Although grass snakes are said to be shy of people this doesn’t seem to be quite true during their mating period; the cracking of a twig trodden on with boots scares them off for a moment but if you stand still the snake may well come forward to study you. So it happened on Tuesday in a roadside coppice in the Paljassaare bird reserve area, where the snakes were enjoying the warm weather. More than twenty grass snakes were seen on a two-hour ramble in the morning; many slithered across the pebbled road, some swished around in last year’s grass among the shrubs.

A third group however who twined around each other doing a "snake dance” crawled away to start with but if one stopped  for a while waiting on their mating ground they returned, noses slightly upturned and aimed straight at the human being.

The two-pronged tongue moved in and out, and so close by that the snake might have slithered across your boot. In the mating period nearness is sought and all interesting beings are noted and studied.