RECORD-EAGLE (Traverse City, Michigan) 18 September 05 Rattler population takes a bite (Bruce Bischoff)
I read in a recent issue of the "North Woods Call" that the Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake may be making its last stand in the swamps of Michigan.
According to the story, a 1990s assessment found rattlers at 204 sites in 50 counties, with populations in Crawford County, Kalkaska County (where I now live), and Iosco County (where I grew up). A more recent study found the snakes at just 79 sites in 27 counties.
Now, it's not my point here to weep crocodile tears over the demise of a potentially dangerous reptile. I long ago declared a unilateral truce in the eons-old war between mammals and reptiles. I'm pretty tolerant of snakes, even those that try to bite me (i.e., every one I've ever handled). I try to not to run over them when they're on the road. And for the past several years, I've provided lodging and meals for a fairly large and foul-tempered iguana who not only has a nasty bite but packs his own bullwhip disguised as a tail.
It's not likely that a massasauga bite would be fatal to a healthy adult. But it's not something I'd want to exerience, having heard vivid tales about snakebit arms turning black and swelling up so fast the shirtsleeve had to be cut off. But having spent most of my life with a flock of small children and/or a couple of goofy dogs in tow, I've learned to be a bit paranoid.
It's true that during a lifetime of poking about the woods and wild lands in Michigan and across North America, I've only experienced that unimstakable buzzing warning up close and personal on two occasions - once on a tower line two-track through the Wildcat Creek swamp near Oscoda, when some of my friends and I inadventently ran over a rattler stretched across the trail, and once on the shores of Roosevelt Lake in central Arizona, when I slid downhill through some loose shale and gravel through knee-high sagebrush to encounter a small but very annoyed rattler. My ex-wife, who was a few yards away at the time and as an Arizona native had grown up with rattlers virtually underfoot, said "Don't move." Good advice, but hard to follow with a buzzing rattler coiling a foot from your naked shins. It's too bad a track measuring crew wasn't there, because I'm certain I'd still hold the world record for the standing backwards broad jump (uphill division). The only injury was to my macho pride.
My ex didn't pay rattlers much heed, perhaps because she'd been around them most of her life and perhaps because she had a snake-savvy dog who acted as an early warning system. In later years I began to wonder whether possibly the snakes instinctively understood, with that sixth sense that animals seem to have, that she was meaner than any rattler that ever crawled and should be given a wide berth.
Back to Michigan and the massasauga. Rattlesnakes are the stuff of folklore, and that's as true in rural Michigan as in Oklahoma. I grew up listening to rattlesnake stories, mostly centered on the Tuttle Marsh and the AuSable River. My dad had stories of hauling marsh hay in the old days, when "you had to tip over every bale to see if there was a snake underneath."
Occasionally our local newspaper would print a photo of a rattler or two killed by a local burgher, and some of them were pretty big snakes - approaching three feet, from the looks of them.
But in recent years the rattlers, like so many other wild critters, seem to be in decline. It's not so much that I like snakes, but a little bit of danger does add spice to the outdoor excperience. And every time another species disappears, a little more of the wild is gone forever.
Rattler population takes a bite