The grass snake is Britain's largest reptile and an important predator of amphibians, but faces multiple pressures including habitat loss, road mortality, and garden management practices.
Grass snake welfare is linked to the availability of suitable habitat across their entire annual cycle: breeding ponds for foraging, sunny basking sites, warm egg-laying substrates, and undisturbed hibernation sites. The intensification and tidying of both rural and urban habitats - loss of compost heaps, scrubby vegetation, and damp rough grassland - removes resources at multiple points in the annual cycle. Garden management that retains compost heaps, log piles, and rough vegetation patches creates genuine welfare benefit for grass snakes and the broader community of invertebrates, amphibians, and reptiles they depend on.