Tony Rayner regularly monitors the reptiles in and around his garden by examining tin sheets that he has scattered in the margins of fields and lawns. Slow-worms are very common visitors and can be found quite early in the year but still Tony was surprised to find that on one transect on 3rd April 2008 he discovered about 30 slow-worms and of those half a dozen appeared to be freshly born juveniles. Slow-worms usually bear young towards the end of summer so it is a mystery why there seemed to be these early/late broods this year. Perhaps the cold summer in 2007 caused some females to hold-over the birth until the spring?