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Like many temperate areas, Great Britain has few snake species: the European adder is the only venomous snake to be found there. The other notable snakes found in Great Britain are the barred grass snake and the smooth snake. Great Britain has three native species of lizard: slowworms, sand lizards and viviparous lizards.
a species that colonised the islands during the glacial retreat at the end of the last ice age (c. 9500 years ago); a species that was present when the English Channel was created (c. 8000 years ago); or, a species that was present in prehistory. This list includes mammals from the small islands around Great Britain and the Channel Islands.
Alternatively species can also be native when they have flown or swum to Britain as is the case with many bird species which arrived after the submersion of the land bridge, a recent example is the collared dove which arrived in the 1950s, this also applies for plants which spread seed in the wind.
The reptiles of Great Britain include three native snakes and three native lizards. A number of sea turtles visit Great Britain's shores. There are also at least seven introduced reptile species.
The mild winters mean that many species that cannot cope with harsher conditions can winter in Britain, and also that there is a large influx of wintering birds from the continent or beyond and even as far as South Africa. There are about 250 species regularly recorded in England, and another 300 that occur with varying degrees of rarity.
This is a list of amphibians of Great Britain. There are seven amphibian species native to Great Britain , in addition, there are a number of naturalized species. The natives comprise three newts , two toads and two frogs .
Great Britain was cut off from mainland Europe in around 8,200 BP by the Storegga Slide tsunami flooding Doggerland. [3] Extinctions in Britain over the period have thus had three main causes: Climate change as the ecosystem swung from temperate woodland and pasture, through open mammoth steppe to uninhabitable polar desert, and back.
Britain receives a number of vagrants from Asia and North America. Some American gulls, ducks and waders are regular enough not to be considered rare, including the ring-billed gull, surf scoter and pectoral sandpiper. There is one endemic bird species found in Great Britain: the Scottish crossbill.