Slow Worm

 I found this little beauty in my garden today.

It's a slow worm (Anguis fragilis) of course. It's not a snake but a type of legless lizard (you can tell the difference because slow worms blink - snakes have no eyelids). And finding one is a lovely treat as they spend much of their time burrowing into loose soil and decaying vegetation. Come October, they tunnel underground to hibernate and remain there until March. I often find them in my compost bin but they're very welcome in my garden as they eat the slugs and snails that would otherwise decimate my vegetable patch.

I don't know how old this one was - it's quite large for a slow worm - but they can live to 20 or 30 years old. It is claimed that one lived to be 54 at Copenhagen Zoo. My slow worm also, unusually, had all of its tail. Slow worms discard the tips of their tails as a defence mechanism (it's where the 'fragilis' part of their scientific name came from). The discarded tail thrashes about for several minutes, distracting their attacker and giving the slow worm the chance to get away. Studies have found that 50-70% of wild slow worms have lost their tails, leaving them with a rounded tail rather than a point.

One of my daughters with a slow worm a few years ago

But why are they called slow worms? After all, they're not particularly slow - they can move at speeds of up to 0.5 kilometres per hour (0.3 miles per hour). Firstly, the 'worm' part is easy - the old English word wyrm was applied to anything that crawled or slithered from earthworms to imaginary dragons. As for the 'slow' part, it may simply be derived from 'slowe worm' i.e. a slow snake, which seems sensible. However, some claim that it comes from the word slaw (slay) because people once believed that these animals had a sting that would kill you. Perhaps our ancestors found it difficult to distinguish them from adders or assumed that all 'wyrms' are venomous? Plus, the tip of a complete tail is covered by sharp horny scales and may have felt like a sting of sorts. Perhaps people saw a parallel between bees and slow worms leaving their 'sting' behind them?  Shakespeare's witches even mention 'the blind worm's sting' in Macbeth. 

Blind worm is a common folk name for the slow worm, probably because of its small eyes or the fact that it sometimes shuts its eyes when picked up. They are also known in some parts of the UK as deaf adders and (not so common now) long cripples.

I've never come across a great deal of folklore about slow worms, other than the idea that they are in some way dangerous. George Abbey in his book The Balance of Nature and Modern Conditions of Cultivation (1909) refers to these fears as follows: 

'Country people, like Shakespeare, regard it as the ‘eyeless venomous worm’ and have a dread of the ‘blind-worm’s sting’ but both without cause,as it rarely bites, and scarcely makes any impression on the skin, its teeth being very small.'

Rather, these beautiful elegant creatures are a boon to any garden. And they are a protected species as are all of the UK's native reptiles.