In Search of Snakes
by
Mary A. Green
I guess it's just one of the ironies of my life that I first learned about a Manitoba natural treasure - the new internationally recognized garter snake dens of the Interlake region - while visiting my sister at Haney, British Columbia. I had gone o ut to the coast in late winter of 1978 to get a break from the prairie weather, and to visit kinfolk who had taken up permanent residence on the west side of the Rockies. There, while browsing through a nephew's collection of National Geographic ma gazines, I was pleasantly surprised to find an article Manitoba's Fantastic Snake Pits, written by Dr. Michael Aleksiuk.Although intrigued by Dr. Aleksiuk's account of his study of the red-sided garter snake, and amazed that the phenomenon he described occurred just sixty miles north of Winnipeg, I wasn't motivated to rush out for a look at the crawly creatures. Not even if they had made it into a report in a prestigious journal. You see, I am one of those people who have what seems to be a typical human aversion to snakes.
Then in May of 1979, a girl from the ''in-group" of my daughter's Grade Five class got to see the snakes. And I knew there would be no peace at our house until we took our child to see them, too. I agreed to go along, but only if I would be allowed to si t in the car while she and her dad roamed the wilds on their own.
Of course, we needed to know where all this was happening and our daughter told us that "everybody was going to Inwood." The following Sunday, we packed our lunch and drinking water and headed north.
At Inwood, we stopped to get more specific directions. We were informed that we should go on further, to Narcisse. "Just ahead up that road and you can't miss them," advised the friendly station attendant.
I wasn't sure of what we should be looking for but, as we passed through the hamlet of Narcisse I began recalling something of what I had read in the Geographic Geographic article. By-now, we were on a country trail in a cow pasture. I suggested t o my husband that he park the car and then proceed on foot toward what looked like a rocky ridge bordered by straggly bushes and a couple of anemic aspen trees.
"But there's nothing to see here," he protested, now determined to car around and to head back toward the main road. Our daughter began to cry. With a groan of resignation, I suggested that she and I walk over toward the rocky ridge. Perhaps, if we saw o ne or two snakes along the way she would be pacified and then we could all go home. I still consider my exit from the car that day to be one of the most courageous acts of my life.
"A snake is not a waterfall or an elephant," I muttered, "You have to get out of a car to see it." I led the way with eyes scanning the ground.
Sure enough, there was one snake and then another and then may more slithering purposefully in this direction and that. "Why, they're cute little rascals," I thought aloud. By the time we reached the rocks, we had to pick our way carefully among them; an d then, at the ridge I saw a dozen or so smaller snakes intertwined with a larger one in a "mating ball", I began to feel a little uneasy. However, we were now looking into one of the famous limestone pits and, fascinated, continued to watch as more matin g balls formed along its sides and on the rocks at the bottom when females for summer migration, fervently sought their favor.
It is because of these pits that the snakes come to Narcisse. Here at the very edge of the prairie, the soil cover becomes very thin leaving the earth's bedrock close to the surface. Centuries of erosion have created the pits with the underground crevass es where, below frost level, the red-sided garter snakes hibernate each winter.
As the spring sun warms the rocks of their dens the males, being smaller in size, respond to the warming first and emerges several days ahead of the females. Here they wait, and as each female emerges the natural survival instinct drives them into this m ating frenzy that insures every female is pregnant before she leaves the den area.
Summer migration takes each snake as far as ten miles from their home. In mid-August, the females give birth to anywhere from fifteen to forty live young. The babies must fend for themselves as soon as they have been born. Unlike their parents who return to the same den each fall, the young ones will spend. their first winter in ant hills, animal burrows and any crevasses they can find.
As each snake travels it excretes a pheronome. Using its tongue as a sensor, another snake crossing the trail will be able to detect which den the traveller came from, its breeding state and anything else that one snake needs to know about another.
The red-sided garter snakes of Manitoba feed on insects, frogs, mice, earth worms, slugs, and even minnows. In tum, they are preyed upon by skunks, fixes, coyotes and crows. The crows take only the snake's liver by excising it efficiently with beaks as sharp as scalpels.
But the snakes' most dangerous enemy is man. In addition to those creatures beaten to death with sticks and. stones by people who still do not understand them, tens of thousands of the garter snakes have been picked and sold to dealers. Some of these ha ve been distributed to universities for scientific and medical research,but the majority have ended up in the lucrative pet trade. Snakes bought from a picker for fifty cents might end up in a pet store with a price tage of forty dollars. People in Natural resources say that as many as 90,000 o our garter snakes were removed from Manitoba one year. As a result, in 19889, they imposed a province-wide moratorium on the snake harvest. Poachers are prosecuted.
The Narcisse dens were made a Wldlife Mananagement area in 1983. Signs are now posted on Highway 17 directing travellers to the pits which have been fenced off. Today's visitors to Manitoba's world famous snake dens do not have to guess if they have com e to the right place.