SUN-TIMES (Chicago, Illinois) 26 April 06 Chicago area needs more rattlesnakes? (Gary Wisby)
There are rattlesnakes in the Chicago area.
Not many, but federal and state wildlife officials want there to be more.
Are they nuts?
Convincing the public that the area needs more poisonous reptiles may be the hardest part of getting a recovery plan approved for the Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake, admits Mike Redmer of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
"Massasaugas have been persecuted pretty heavily," said Redmer, a snake expert and habitat restoration coordinator. "In the '60s and '70s the Boy Scouts did roundups. It was their good deed. In parts of Lake and Cook counties in the late 1800s, farmers would turn their hogs loose on them."
Though venomous, the species isn't generally considered deadly to humans. Redmer could find scattered references to bites but only one fatality -- in Indiana sometime before the mid-'30s.
Shy and docile, the rattler uses venom as a "tool" to immobilize and help digest its prey, Redmer said. "It wasn't evolved to give humans a hard time. It's so small, it doesn't deliver the volume it takes to kill."
In October, his agency and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources assembled a task force to explore which sites in Illinois have enough Massasaugas, now listed as endangered, to be the nuclei for self-sustaining populations. On the local team are representatives of the forest preserve districts in Cook, Lake and Will counties and Lincoln Park Zoo. This spring they've found rattlers at six northern Illinois spots.
The most promising site -- identified only as being in the upper Des Plaines River watershed to keep poachers away -- is about 100 acres. Its soil gets spongy when it rains and is pocked with the crayfish burrows where the solitary snakes live.
Researchers there are gently capturing, measuring, weighing and determining the sex of the animals and putting them back where they were found -- seven so far. The biggest was 27 inches long. Redmer estimates there are as many as 12 snakes, their homes clustered in a radius of 50 yards.
Checking the site this week with John Rogner, head of Fish & Wildlife's regional office, Redmer found a female Massasauga. As the motionless snake sunned herself, he took a reading with a transponder -- "it works like I-Pass" -- that told him she already had been captured and implanted with a microchip.
Noting she'd moved several yards since last being seen, Redmer marked the new spot with a pink flag and recorded it with a GPS locator. Then he pointed an instrument at the snake and took the temperatures of her head, body and tail.
Once all the data are in, scientists will assess each site. Ones that pass muster will become part of a statewide recovery plan that should be completed within a year.
Part of that plan could be to render the Des Plaines watershed site wetter, and thus more rattler-friendly, by removing drainage tiles.
How many rattlers would be a healthy population? "You might want to shoot for several hundred," Rogner said -- prompting Redmer to add: "This is where you want to educate the public."
A colleague has told him how hard it was to persuade people in Idaho to accept grizzly bears as neighbors.
"They're still warm, fuzzy animals," Redmer said. But rattlesnakes? "I wonder if it would be tougher than grizzlies in convincing people they're worthwhile to have around."
Chicago area needs more rattlesnakes?