Garter Snake Rescue

Plains Garter Snake: PC Yatin Kalki

Date:
May 6th 2015

The Trip:

I was doing my regular Mark and Recapture Study of the Garter Snakes on campus and Tristan was helping me. We were walking around catching all the snakes that we saw, when I saw 2 bright orange stripes in a bush. I knew that they were the dorsal stripes of the Plains Garter Snakes that I was catching but I didn't want to disturb them because I thought that they were mating. I took a closer look and saw some green netting around the snakes. The snakes were also a little too still to be mating. They were trapped in the net! I called Tristan over and he held the snakes steady while I cut the net away from the bush with my pocketknife. We took the trapped snakes to a rock to cut the net away from the snakes.

Snakes trapped in net: PC Tristan Schramer

I inspected the snakes and found that both were males. One snake also had severe scale damage from the net cutting into his body. I took out my surgical scissors and started cutting the net away. We freed one snake at a time and inspected the scale damage to see it was serious.

Scale damage: PC Tristan Schramer

Scale damage: PC Tristan Schramer

Freeing the snakes from the net: PC Tristan Schramer

Scale damage: PC Tristan Schramer

The damage wasn't severe and I knew that these snakes would live. However, if we hadn't found and freed them, they would have died slow and painful deaths of starvation. Both snakes were snakes that I had caught before. They had the characteristic black marker marks that I put on all the Garters I catch here. We let the snakes go after recording their data. We then ripped up as much of the green netting that we could from the surrounding bushes so that more snakes didn't find themselves in the same situation.

A little bit more about my research on the campus Garter Snakes: About 3 days a week, I go to Boneyard Creek and catch, measure and mark as many Garter Snakes as I can. I then let them go exactly where I caught them. Each snake is marked differently so I can tell individual snakes apart. The aim of the study is to get a population estimate of the snakes there.

All the snakes caught that day: PC Tristan Schramer

Each time I go to the creek, I catch around 8-20 snakes, of which a good number will be recaptures.