I’d say they probably were adders if you caught them basking on the path. In general grass snakes are more common, but they typically get out of the way at the slightest disturbance, so all you usually see of them is their tails vanishing in to the undergrowth. Adders aren’t as quick off the mark, so are more often seen on paths. They prefer heathland and more open, sunny spots, where grass snakes go for longer grassy areas and often are near water.

That is assuming that it was actually a snake. Slow worms are often mistaken for snakes and will also spend time basking on tracks. They are usually much lighter in colour and have a smooth pale, metallic bronze look.

Adders are more obviously scaled and are a deeper grey or brown colour with a very distinctive dark zigzag pattern on their backs.

They almost certainly won’t have been smooth snakes or anything else though.

Hmm - that’s Yahoo for you. I try to avoid it as mush as possible. I couldn’t find the same piece elsewhere at the time, but a month on this looks like the same article..

After a tense 3-way tie, a tie-breaking roll of the die resulted in this atmospheric woodland shot by YungOnions becoming the winner and our new summer banner.

As /u/Steve@startrek.website suggests, that certainly looks like sand that has been washed out by water around the hole, so I don’t know whether that’s relevant.

Either way, the hole itself doesn’t look like a badger snuffle hole or latrine, so I’d say fox is more likely.

At the point where you and the AI can see someone straightening their tie in a certain way and you and the AI can exchange a single wordless glance and you both burst out laughing 'cos it was just like that thing that you both saw 6 months ago and found hilarious then - then maybe.

Not before.

If you have some late entries and can get them over to me before midnight, I will delay putting up the voting thread till then!

A few things off the top of my head:

• I made a particularly tasty shakshuka over the weekend.
• I saw a stoat leading her kits nose to tail, so that they looked like a single, bounding, furry snake as they crossed the track a few days back. I have only seen stoats doing that twice before in my life.
• in Forge of Empires, which I have recently started playing, my defending PvP army successfully defeated a challenger: the first time that has happened, and it left me feeling ridiculously happy.
• Albert Finney and Sean Connery’ interaction in the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express
• My partner’s pleasure at completing a 1940s style knitted top. It has turned out extremely well.

I don’t think that Smokey the Bear featured in PSAs for this in the UK.

Rupert the Bear, possibly, but not Smokey.

Thanks for these great shots!

The voting thread will go up on Thursday.

in Canada, where we have seen individual conflagrations consume many billions of trees in 2023

It has been estimated that there are approximately 3 billion trees in the UK in total. The UK has been assessed to be one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. Any fire that consumed ‘many billions’ of trees in the UK, would leave no trees left at all.

This is a local new story - local to the forest of Dean. It is unusual, however, in that it was a fire that affected (relatively recently planted) woodland at all. Typically in the UK, native woodland is a mixture of broadleaf species - pretty resistant to burning compared to conifers - and are often too wet to burn at all anyway. Even significant forest fires in the Forestry Commission’s extensive conifer plantations are uncommon.

We do have much larger wildfires than this in the UK - but they are typically heathland or moorland fires, not in wooded areas. Species such as gorse and heather, which tend to dominate on heathland, are adapted to periodic fires and will recover relatively quickly. The main issues with those - as is mentioned with this incident - is death of the fauna in the area.

I didn’t use to shave - also seeing it as a chore - but as I aged, I found that the upper edge of my beard was creeping up my cheeks to the point where I was beginning to see the upper edge at the bottom of my vision, which I found weird and disconcerting, so ended up trimming the top edge. That looked weird, and so I progressed and eventually settled on a goatee kinda thing, which I have been told by several people suits me - so I stick with it.

I use a wet shave: soapy water, then a shave gel and then shave with the grain. I have never timed it but it takes around the same length of time overall as cleaning my teeth, I suppose. It is reasonably smooth - but not mega-smooth by any means. I do it each morning.