You spotted snakes with double tongue,

Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen,

Newts and blindworms, do no wrong,

Come not near our Fairy Queen.

Titania is heading into a very hard night. She is, after all, on the point of being drugged by her estranged husband, leading to an infatuation with a donkey. However – and far be it from me to question the bard – I struggle with Shakespeare’s naked anti-wildlife propaganda.

Granted, in his day, spotted snakes AKA adders – the UK’s only genuinely venomous terrestrial vertebrates – would have been widespread and abundant, across vast tracts of common land and field edges. Today they cling on as isolated populations on fragments of remnant habitat. The likelihood of an unfortunate encounter with a spotted snake, while still infinitesimally small, was hugely greater in the 1500s and 1600s.

An adder. (Image: Danny Green)

But were you a sleeping fairy, you would simply never have fallen foul of an adder. Adders strike humans (and fairies) exceptionally rarely and only in self-defence. In a lifetime of watching wildlife, I have known only two people bitten by adders. The first was a schoolfriend who stupidly picked up an infant adder while on a cross country run. Under the circumstances, the terrified viper can hardly be blamed for biting him. The second incident was likewise self-preservation. An ecologist friend, undertaking a........

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