Good information.
Reminded me of a time one summer (mid ‘90s) that I was training some lads on Cannock Chase.
They were practising an advance to (visual) contact through a small valley. Prone crawl.
The weather was warm and dry.
One of them suddenly jumped up screaming and ran around (in full guillie cam) shouting that he’d been bitten by a huge snake. (Quite amusing).
What a tw@t all the trainers thought and homed in on him to give him a rifting.
On inspection he had what looked like a small cut on his cheek just below the eye!
We walked over to where he had jumped up, no sign of any snakes, just an old piece of very weathered wooden sign board (defunct range warning probably) laying flat amongst the small grass hummocks.
The immediate supposition was that he’d crawled into one of the rough edges of it, face first. (Not an impossibility with the restricted vision/awareness that full head cam can cause.
That was, until one of the trainers lifted a corner of the board.
Beneath it were 3 of the biggest snakes I’d ever seen off the telly! I’m not joking. Although they were coiled up you could tell that one of them was several feet long and at least as thick as yer forearm.
Two were defo adders - classic colours; the third looked very smooth and light brown if I recall correctly.
Notably they were all curled around what looked like a clutch of eggs!
The large one lifted its head, showed it’s fangs and poked its tongue in our direction at which point David Attenborough dropped the corner of the board he’d been holding. We quickly advanced in the opposite direction but checking every step!
We stood the exercise down and casevac’d the lad to the nearest med centre.
He was none the worse for his encounter apart from feeling lousy for about 24 hours.
We told him he‘d failed that section and back-squadded him.
We kept clear of that area for the rest of the course.
On a serious note though, if that had been a kiddy!…….