THE STANDARD (St Catherines, Ontario) 10 July 03 Their job is to protect Rocky the rattler (Matthew Van Dongen)
Photo: Devin Milos and Rob Tervo of the Ministry of Natural Resources take a careful look at Rocky, an Eastern Massasauga rattler. (Matthew Van Dongen)
Most people would have been distracted by the blasting heat of the afternoon sun and the determined buzzing of blood-sucking insects.
But as he pushed through the dense jungle of long grass on the periphery of the Wainfleet bog Tuesday, Rob Tervo didn’t appear to have any concentration problems.
Searching for the Eastern Massasauga rattler, Ontario’s only venomous snake, is a wonderful way to focus the mind.
Tervo and fellow species-at-risk technician Devin Milos were out on Tuesday searching for Rocky, a grey-brown rattler, almost a metre along, who likes to linger on the edge of the bog.
Ministry of Natural Resources employees such as Tervo and Milos have been tracking the movements of the bog’s rattler population since 1999, said ministry biologist Anne Yagi.
Part of the reason for the study is to map out the “critical habitat” of the snakes, whose threatened population in the bog is estimated at less than 200.
Yagi hopes the result of the report will be a two-kilometre “buffer zone” around the bog to protect them from new road construction and development dangers.
New roads are a special danger to the snakes, which use hot pavement in the summer to warm their cold-blooded bodies.
“Any major highway that is built through West Lincoln, Port Colborne, Wainfleet is bad news for threatened species in general,” she said.
“When (Highway) 58 came through, tons of rattlesnakes were killed. The gene pool from that area is gone.”
By the end of the year, Yagi will have submitted a preliminary report to regional and municipal councils detailing the proposed buffer zone.
She’s also talked about the proposal with Ministry of Environment staff in connection with to the proposed mid-peninsula highway.
Yagi said rattlers don’t travel farther than two kilometres from their territory — but they do head outside the bog in the spring to sun themselves in open spaces.
On Tuesday, Rocky is hidden away out of the sun in dense undergrowth that seems to hold a myriad of potential hiding places.
Yet Tervo searches quickly and confidently, poking here and there with the aid of his metre-long “snake stick,” what looks like a golf club tipped with a curved metal hook.
The searchers know generally where to look, since they and Rocky have played this hide-and-seek game in the past.
Two years ago, the rattler was implanted with a radio transmitter, which Tervo now tracks with the help of a telemetry antenna that beeps as the searchers near their target.
Implanting and releasing the snake also allow researchers to track the movements of the females that Rocky encounters.
But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier to catch. On Tuesday, Rocky was displeased to be roused from underneath his shady, inaccessible bush.
After several failed attempts, Tervo manages to grab the testy rattler with a long pair of tongs and the help of Milos’ snake stick.
Rocky’s mood is as loud and clear as its rattling tail, but Milos is unperturbed.
“It’s a matter of experience, you know how to deal with it,” he said. “If you see it reared back in the strike position, you know it wants to snap. But other times, you’ll find them sleepy and basking in the sun — no problem at all.”
The snakes aren’t typically a danger to humans, Yagi takes pains to point out.
“Some people have this perception that rattlers are these dangerous snakes ready to bite at you as you walk by,” she said. “That’s not the case.”
She said in five years of study and capture, none of her crew has been bitten — even after stepping on hidden serpents by accident.
Ignorance about the nature and value of the reptiles is still something the ministry has to deal with, according to Yagi.
She and her staff have caught would-be poachers in the bog looking to make a quick buck, while other people prefer killing them for fun. “You get drunks out there who make it a game,” she said. “They actually try to hit them with their trucks.”
But on the whole, farmers and homeowners around the bog have responded favourably to the ministry’s research, said Yagi.
She said the proposed buffer zone is meant to discourage suburban development and highways, but wouldn’t interfere with existing farms or homes.
She added some farmers are even willing to change their plowing practices to help revive the threatened species, which suffered from decades of peat extraction from their bog habitat.
On Tuesday, a local farmer stopped his tractor to chat with “the snake guys,” about the general health and whereabouts of Rocky’s peers.
“People who live here grew up with them,” Yagi said. “They’re willing to help out.”
Their job is to protect Rocky the rattler
Their job is to protect Rocky the rattler