Snake House is in the news again

M_surinamensis

Shillelagh Law
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1,165
I wonder if anyone involved realizes that relocation and sealing off a denning site is one of the least humane options. The survival rate of species which return to stable denning sites when relocated and unable to access that site is very, very low. Most individuals go into an immediate decline as a result of the disruption to their usual behavior and patterns as they relate to the space they occupy; it manifests as a general disorientation and they end up seemingly incapable of locating water or feeding properly, failing to thermoragulate and locate new shelter. The ones that might make temporary adjustments pretty well die off a little later anyway, as the instinct to return to the impossible to find or access denning site kicks in. So they either dehydrate, starve and die of summer exposure... or they manage to sort of keep going, in poor condition but alive until they dehydrate, starve and freeze to death.

It'd be kinder and safer to just kill them, though there's a good chance that would be illegal. A quick web search tells me that all native snakes are protected non-game species in Idaho, making it illegal to kill them unless they represent a threat to personal health and safety. Property management is listed as one of the ways that they can represent a threat to personal health and safety, but it'd be interesting to see how that was applied in reference to a large percentage of a local population rather than a single animal (destruction of a denning site tends to kill all the animals that use it, potentially most or all of them in a radius measured in miles). Specific methods, if they were to be directly killed, are also illegal... can't be poisoned, gassed or burned for example.

The enormous den sites of red sided garters* in Manitoba (eh) have become something of a tourist attraction. The idea of thousands of snakes in one place is unusual to most people, so they go to see what there is to see. They pay a little money, read some information about garter snakes and get exposed to some conservationist messages and generally speaking it works out all around. The snakes are unmolested, the public is educated and a little bit of money gets dropped into Canukustanian wildlife management programs and forestry services. The trick to pulling it off is finding, building or carefully manipulating a denning site so that it's still safe for the snakes while also being something visitors can actually witness in an interesting way. Snake-house might be another such opportunity.

*the Idaho snakes would be common or western terrestrial garters. The article didn't say which. It'd be really interesting if it were both. Multi-species denning isn't unheard of but it is comparatively rare.
 

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