Gordo the snake had gone missing. On September 26, Jonathan Choquette, the head of Wildlife Preservation Canada’s Ojibway Prairie Reptile Recovery Program, and his team were performing routine checks on the reptiles that they track. The team uses radio tags to follow the movements of different species around Ojibway Prairie, a nature reserve in the Windsor-Essex area.
When the team went to track Gordo’s tag there was no signal. Gordo, an Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake, had been raised in captivity and released into Ojibway Prairie in July. Gordo’s great-grandparents had both been native to the Ojibway Prairie area but were saved from encroaching development by a Toronto Zoo-run program in the early 2000s. This meant that Gordo had the genetic make-up unique to rattlesnake in the area. The hope was that he would breed with wild females, bolstering a quickly declining population.
But Gordo’s missing signal raised alarm bells. “Gordo had made some fairly long movements before, so I told my team to fan out about 200 metres around the last known spot and try to get a signal,” says Choquette. “When they couldn’t get a signal, we expanded it to a 400-metre radius.”
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That was when Choquette got a call from one of his field technicians. “He was dead, dead on the road adjacent to the nature reserve and completely flattened, and his radio transmitter was destroyed by the vehicle strike,” says Choquette.
Gordo had died on Matchett Road, a wasteland of reptile roadkill. Reptiles often travel across roads between hibernation sites and foraging grounds, making road mortality a major threat. And with the Massasauga rattlesnake, one of Canada’s few venomous snakes, bordering on extirpation, any death is significant. “It is probably the most endangered reptile in the county, certainly given its numbers,” says Choquette.
This fall, more than 80 reptiles representing six species have already been found dead on local roads, and Choquette estimates that number will rise to 300 by the end of October. A few years back, Choquette found 119 dead snakes on local roads in one day.
That’s why the team is advocating for more protections. “We have simple methods that we can put in place, like snake barrier fencing, to prevent these animals from leaving the park and ending up on the road. We just need the land managers to act and to allow these types of initiatives to be installed,” says Choquette.
Most of the Ojibway Prairie land is owned by the City of Windsor, Ontario Parks, and Infrastructure Ontario. According to Choquette, the funding and materials needed to install the fencing and under-road culverts are dedicated and available. The team just needs a go ahead.
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But rattlesnakes are hard to rally support around. Their venom gives them a bad rap. Yet, they’re integral to the local environment. They act as an intermediate predator, keeping rodent populations under control while providing a food source to bigger predators, such as red-tailed hawks and coyotes.
Plus, their threat to people is minimal. In the Windsor-Essex area, Choquette says there’s about one rattlesnake bite per decade, and it can be treated. The numbers are a little higher around Georgian Bay, where the rattlesnake population is larger and there are more cottagers in rural environments. But the numbers are minimal compared to mortalities from vehicle collisions or even bee stings.
“If we all agree that we want to protect biodiversity, then the small risk of having them should be something that we see as just part of having a diverse landscape,” says Choquette.
Despite the bureaucratic obstacles to erecting roadside fencing, the team is optimistic about a new national urban park proposed for the Windsor-Essex area. In 2021, Parks Canada launched a program to create a network of national urban parks. The first was Rouge Valley near Toronto. The second is meant to be Ojibway Prairie. The question is what will happen with the land once it receives its designation.
“Will it actually bring with it protections so that the wildlife that are in the parks, that are part of this national urban park, don’t just continue to be killed in the road?” says Choquette. “Certainly I would hope so.”
Designation for the national urban park in Ojibway Prairie is scheduled to happen in 2025.
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