Massasauga!

Backdate: 05/27/2005

As a kid growing up, I read everything about snakes I could get my hands on. From the encyclopedia to books at both the school and public libraries. One of the best books a kid can read on snakes is called A Snake Lover's Diary by Barbara Brenner (sounds kind of like an ophiofile's blog, doesn't it?). Anyway, the books that I kept coming back to, that fascinated me the most, were the field guides. Partly because there were so many different kinds of snakes in them, and partly because they showed you exactly where those snakes lived in the United States. I spent countless hours poring over the maps in those books, determining exactly which species lived in Southeastern Wisconsin.

If you are not careful, there are a couple of pitfalls that you can, well, fall into regarding feild guides. The first is too great a reliance on the photos/illustrations as an identification guide. The people who put these books together often seem to try and find a photograph of the most spectacular speciman of a given snake to use in the guide. Often this ends up being the prototypical image you have of a species, so when you come across a "real" one, whose drab, mundane coloring may only hint at the illustration snake, you're not sure exactly what it is. This caused me specific frustration with Wisconsin milk snakes. Didn't they know that they were supposed have much richer red blotches rather than muddy olive brown, and that their ground color should have been much lighter gray in order to present a more asthetic contrast?

The second heresy inexperienced field guide readers might be tempted to embrace is that of distribution uniformity. As a kid I was sure that there were certain types of snakes within a mile of my house because that ground was included in the shaded portion of the range map. I knew nothing of habitat requirements or historical distribution, and certainly had never heard the term "fragmented population". As a result I spent a lot of time looking for certain species in places where they simply did not occur.

One of these was the massasauga rattlesnake. As far as I was concerned my home state was crawling with them, the which fact was clearly demonstrated by the broad swath of colored ink covering Wisconsin on the range maps in all the guides. I did not know, as I do now, that the Massasauga was and is declining across its range as more and more wetlands are drained, more and more of their former habitat is farmed, and people still do not understand that a snake need not be dead to be "a good snake."

Now, older and, hopefully, wiser, I am beginning to understand those things more fully. And while I am not an environmentalist per se, I do believe in conservation, in being wise stewards of the creation entrusted to us. Yes, even-- no, especially,-- when it comes to herptiles. And my herping has become more focused on the areas where the snakes are likely to actually live, a fact that has boosted my hunt/find ratio considerabley, as well as adding several species to my "life list".

Which brings me to my breif, exhilarating story.

I had been intending for some time to visit a certain area of my new home state, Ohio, as I believed, due to habitat along with other factors, that I would have a really good chance of finding my first rattlesnake there. Specifically, a Massasauga. When I found out that there were some fishing ponds nearby, I knew I could work the trip out. My brother, Joel, and his family come to our house every year to visit, and we always take a day to go fishing and look for critters.

So that is how it happened that on May 26 of this year, Joel and I found ourselves getting absolutely skunked on what looked to be a great pond to fish. To this day, I think he believes that I knew the fishing was no good and just took him there for the herps. For the record, completely untrue. However, after about an hour of endless casting resulting in exactly "0" strikes. We decided to put the poles back in the car and see if we could find some snakes.

We caught several frogs in a woods nearby, once we figured out the proper pounce, and then drove on to a field that looked promising. When we came upon an area of scattered surface debris, I believe my pulse quickened significantly, and a light sweat broke out on my forehead. There had to be snakes here; garters, black rats, something! Turns out I was right. After the first few pieces of cover had been turned we came upon one that harbored three snakes. 2 Eastern Garters and a Smooth Green Snake (my first in the field). I think if that was all we had found, that would have been enough. It wasn't.

The next piece of cover, some roofing tin, held two more Garters. As my friend Mark would say, "meh". We moved to the next piece of tin.

We lifted it to reveal two snakes. One was a Garter, the other was a thick, gray serpent with brownish blotches on it. It was as if my brain had no mental template this snake would match. I blame both my high excitement level, along with Field Guide Pitfall #1. "What is it?" I sort of sputtered, "A black rat?"

It was as I uttered these words that we heard the rattle. Of course, Joel had already ID'd it. "No, man, Massasauga!" There it was.

Yes, we picked it up. We probably should not have, both for our own safety as well as the snake's. It is, after all, an endangered species in Ohio and over most of its range. But I have now seen and handled one of the neatest snakes there is.

A few things struck me. One was how stout, almost comically so, this snake was. The head size was probably normal for a colubrid (a family of snakes that hold to more typical, snakelike proportions) of the same length, but looked well undersized on this viper. The rattler appeared to be female but only a visual check was made. I was not going to probe this thing. She also appeared to be gravid as well as having a slight midbody lump which I presumed was a meal that was nearly digested. The other thing about this snake was the speed with which she was able to move, despite her portliness. She made probably three mock strikes while we observed her on the ground. If we had been too close, there would have been no getting out of the way.

Turned out to be the last snake of the day. High fives were given and we went on our way. By the way, the picture up top (borrowed from herpnet.net, which holds the image's copyright) is not the snake we found. But it does look almost exactly like her. No field guide "models" here.