Mating slow-worms

[scipio]

It has been an interesting day.
Firstly when we were folding up an old plastic sheet we found this little chap.

Very lively he was too. We have had resident toads before but not (to our knowledge) for a few years. We hope he stays.

I then went to check on the slime mould (not as bad as it sounds) growing on my compost heap and found a pair of slow-worms. We have has slow-worms for many years, often basking on my compost heap but I have never seen this before:

Sorry about the lighting. I had to reluctantly use flash as it was rather dark in there.
I had to look this up to understand what was going on. Apparently the male grabs the female by the throat for an hour or so as part of the mating process. As far as I could see not a lot else was happening. After I went to get a better camera they had separated but were still in contact:

The male is the greyer, slimmer one and the female is the fatter bronzed one with the chocolate-brown lower half.
She then led off giving me a doleful look.

He followed behind.
I look forward to seeing the young in the autumn.
What with our resident male stag-horn beetle (for the last 4 days) and new bat (Leislers?) its getting very exciting out there. We feel very lucky.

[deer boy]

Nice shots scipio i found two toads at the weekend great little things

[Meta menardi]

Are you using a bat detector (not to find mating slow worms) to find/diagnose your Leisler's bat, and if so what model. I have a Magenta Bat Mk11a, but I think I have gone about as far with it as I can. Good fun, but I would like to get more discriminatory stuff from something a bit more advanced.

I am so impressed that you have photos of mating Slow Worms, can't be many of those around.

[demicav]

Super pics.

[wildmanofthewoods]

Good shots, The 2nd one down is a cracker showing some interesting behaviour

[mrs fish]

Amazing piece of wildlife

[scipio]

Thanks for your friendly comments. In spite of having slow worms in our garden for decades I had never seen this behaviour before either, so I was somewhat dumbstruck when I saw this (again apologies for the shaky photo):

It was at this point that I returned to my computer to find out what was going on: was this a death grip? Fortunately I found this pretty quickly:
BBC - h2g2 - The Slow-worm
which states
Mating occurs in late April or May, and there is often rivalry between males for a particular female. Some old males bear permanent battle-scars on their bodies. The successful male grabs a female by the neck during a long mating ritual.
After mating, the female incubates the fertilised eggs inside her body. Each young slow-worm develops inside an egg sac, which breaks when the mother gives birth in August/September. During the summer she lies in the sun to help the developing eggs grow. This way of looking after the eggs is called ovo-viviparous, because the young emerge from their mother inside their egg sac.
Let us hope we get some sunshine!

PS to Meta: My bat detector is a Ciel CBD101. Same performance as yours I would imagine

[lovelyhelen]

It's what I saw the two i found doing in my garden the other week - it looks rather scary and certainly not entirely effective at this point as the 2 I found were at right angles to each other with the male biting the female's head - however no functional bits were touching so I presume there is a further few steps to go through before baby slow worms!!

[scipio]

Of course, it might have been afterwards. This was!

In the end she got fed up with him hanging on and used her superior strength to get rid of him. She rotated about her axis until his head was upside down. At that point he let go. I was so interested I didn't take a picture until snap no4 in my original post. I could almost imagine you can see the compression marks at the back of her skull.
Incidentally I haven't seen any slow worms at all since. Just the male stag beetle again this afternoon

[lovelyhelen]

I could definitley see the compression marks on the female I saw - her head was somewhat dented!!