I don’t envy Bob’s job. Getting people to write articles for herpetological society newsletters is a difficult if not impossible task, as I know all too well. During my two years editing The Ontario Herpetological Society News (from 1999 to 2001), I had to beg, plead and cajole people to write articles for me. Of the articles I did get, more than a few were so badly written that I had to edit them heavily. Rewriting the articles sentence by sentence did not always go over well with some of the authors, who objected to every change I made to their prose. Even if it was awful. Especially, it seemed, if it was awful.

But problems with grammar and spelling weren’t the only issues. In many cases the articles were written well enough, but were in a convoluted and overwrought style; others didn’t seem to have much of a point. And some were just too darn long.

Don’t misunderstand me: herpers aren’t necessarily bad writers. But I do think they could use some guidance—some advice that would allow them to make the most of what they’ve got, and say what they’re trying to say, without tripping up. Every kind of writing is different: you don’t write a newspaper article, or an instruction manual, the same way you write a novel. No one, to my knowledge, has sat down to write something that said, “This is how you write an article for a herpetological newsletter.” So I thought I would try.

I think the reason why it’s so hard to get herpers to write an article is that they’re just too intimidated by the prospect. I’ve seen authorities in their field, with all kinds of tips and tricks to share, absolutely freeze when someone tried to hit them up to write something for The OHS News. They couldn’t imagine doing it. Total panic. Even a short article for a club newsletter with a tiny circulation is too much for people who are too self-conscious about their writing. Those of us who are comfortable with our writing don’t always appreciate that.

Most of the problems I encountered in the writers’ articles were, I think, a result of that self-consciousness. Those writers who could work up the nerve to submit something to me ended up trying too hard. Essentially, they overdid it: by trying to be professional, they came across as convoluted; by trying to be comprehensive, they ended up writing articles that were too long, or contained material that wasn’t really needed for the article’s purpose.

Telling people not to be afraid won’t help: easier said than done! And giving a crash course in grammar is beyond the scope of this article (or this newsletter, for that matter). But I can offer some suggestions that might help you write a reptile article, if some of what I’ve described seems all too familiar to you.

First, write informally. You’re writing for a herp newsletter, not Reptiles magazine, and certainly not Copeia. Your audience is small (usually fewer than a hundred people), and it’s made up of your friends and acquaintances, not a bunch of scary professors and experts who might humiliate you for the least mistake. We’re not going to make fun of you for writing something—in fact, we’re going to be proud of you for stepping up and trying. Most of us know what stage fright is like.

One thing you could try is to write your article as though you were explaining something to a friend via e-mail. (Except, of course, you’d be more careful about spelling and punctuation.) I’ve known people who were perfectly articulate in their correspondence and in person, but who clammed up completely when they tried to Write Something. Get over that. Forget any notions of writing for posterity. Don’t worry about how you’re telling your story—just tell it. Relax!

My second suggestion is to limit your focus. As I’ve said, too many articles try to cover too much. Writing the definitive article on a subject or species is not only overwhelming and intimidating, it’s impossible to do well. You can’t know enough—you can’t read enough—to be that authoritative. There have been professors who have spent their entire lives working on definitive works of a single genus: Howard Gloyd spent his entire life working on his monograph on Agkistrodon, and died before he could finish it!

I’ve tried to follow this strategy with my own articles. I’ve never written the definitive article on the captive care of Butler’s Garter Snakes, for example, but I did co-write an article on how to convert them to a mouse-based diet: this was something I knew about directly, and could speak to with a certain amount of authority and confidence. And when it came time to write a couple of articles about raising baby garter snakes, I focused on some of the things I’d learned by doing it myself, rather than worrying about being comprehensive.

Which ties into my third point: have something to say. I’ve seen many articles that were the result of the author consulting their libraries: a little research, a little cribbing, and here’s yet another care sheet that’s indistinguishable from all the other care sheets that have ever been written for that species. I’m sorry, but that’s boring. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel or repeat what everyone else has already said. But if you bring your personal experience to the article, you make it unique. Suddenly, you have something new to say—and something that other people will want to pay attention to.

And that will shine through—no matter how badly you spell.

Few people are crazy enough to breed garter snakes and raise the babies, but more than a few of us have unexpectedly been handed the task of raising a large number of baby garter snakes. We may, for example, have been handed a “rescued” garter snake that turns out to be very, very pregnant, which then surprises you one day with dozens of her offspring slithering around her cage.

Oh great, you think. Now what? Suddenly you’re faced with having to look after a whole bunch of little snakes. The sheer number of them can make that a very intimidating situation. And raising baby garter snakes isn’t the same as raising a litter or two of corn snakes. Garter snakes don’t eat mice, you think, and they’re too small for pinkies anyway — how are you going to feed them all?

Taking care of an adult garter snake, especially if it’s been trained to eat mice, isn’t really any different from taking care of your average colubrid. But baby garter snakes are different. Their special requirements can trip you up if you’re not ready for them, but they’re not that difficult once you know them. I call them the Seven Rules of Raising Baby Garter Snakes, and I’ll share them with you here.

Rule #1: Garter snakes shed immediately after birth. The books say that baby snakes shed seven to 10 days after birth, after which you can begin offering them food. (Even Perlowin’s book on garter snakes states this as a fact.) The first time I had a litter of baby garters, I didn’t see the birth itself, so I waited. And waited. It never came. The next year I was able to watch the whole gory process, and, to my surprise, they were shedding within minutes of breaking out of the birth sac. The shed skins were so thin, they practically disintegrated under the traffic of 42 baby snakes (and one adult); if I hadn’t seen them shed, I’d never have known they’d done it. So if you’re waiting for them to shed before offering them food, don’t.

Rule #2: House baby garter snakes in small groups. The conventional wisdom is to house baby snakes individually in small containers. If you’re facing a large litter of garter snakes — as I did in 2002 with my litter of 42 red-sided garters — that’s an impractical number of plastic boxes. Fortunately, housing them together isn’t a problem. Not only is it more convenient, but baby garter snakes have been observed to be calmer when housed in groups. (Garter snakes aggregate in the wild, especially during hibernation, so we shouldn’t assume that they’re completely asocial.) I split my litter of 42 among four five-gallon tanks: 10 to 11 snakes each. They were small enough at the time that it worked; over time I managed to sell a few, so I ended up able to have fewer snakes per cage as they got larger.

They should still be fed individually, though; more about that later.

Rule #3: Dessication is a serious risk on hot days. Dessication can be fatal on hot, dry days, so you want to be able to have a moist spot. The entire cage shouldn’t be moist, because that encourages blister disease. But you can keep a clump of moistened sphagnum moss in one corner of an otherwise dry cage to prevent the snakes from drying out.

Rule #4: Getting baby garter snakes to start eating is hard. I’ve had some troubles getting the little monsters to start eating, and I think there were several reasons for this. For one thing, they’re too small for some of the more conveniently acquired food items, such as pinky mice or bait-store nightcrawlers. Some of them — my wandering garter snakes, for example — looked good and plump at birth, and weren’t hungry, probably due to retained egg yolk. Others had trouble recognizing what they were being offered as food, either because it didn’t move (they responded to live fish but ignored fish fillet and cut-up worms) or because they wanted to eat worms rather than fish or vice versa. Some baby garter snakes would eat anything I gave them; some were fussy; some refused everything I could find.

Which brings me to Rule #5: Using “natural” garter snake food is hard. When people think about garter snake food, they think fish, worms and frogs. We’ll leave aside frogs (i.e., tadpoles) for this article and focus on fish and worms, which are more easily obtained. Whole, live fish can be expensive and full of parasites; you need a lot of them and it’s hard to control how many each snake eats if you’re offering a dish full of fish to a cage full of snakes. Whole worms are too big for baby garters if you buy the big nightcrawlers from bait stores; small worms you collect out of the garden (or off the street when it rains — though that can’t be healthy, can it?) work just fine, and baby garters seem to love them, but it’s hard to get enough of them. And, as I mentioned before, baby garters don’t always recognize worm pieces or fish fillet as food.

A snake being fed fish or worms needs to eat a lot: as often as twice a week. If you have a full litter (two dozen babies, for example), do the math and brace yourself for how many you’re going to need. Assume two to four fish or worms per feeding, per snake, and assume two feedings per week, and you’re looking at around 100 to 200 live fish or small worms each week. That’s a lot of money spent at Big Al’s or time spent digging in the garden!

Now you know why nobody breeds garter snakes.

Rule #6: Getting them on pinkies is easier than you think. Fortunately, worms and fish aren’t your only option. As you may know, I advocate converting garter snakes to a mouse-based diet. It’s not only easier and cheaper, but it’s easier to keep them healthy and growing. I originally thought you had to feed babies fish and worms until they were large enough to accept scented pinky parts, and that’s how I proceeded in 2001 and 2002, when I had large litters to deal with. I lost a lot of babies before they were converted to mice: some to dessication, some to the simple fact that I couldn’t give them enough food. But once I got them onto mice, they were fine; the trick was to get them to that point.

But in 2003, when I had acquired a handful of baby garters, I tried something new: feeding them very small pinky parts right from the outset. And it worked! Not only that, but some of them were more enthusiastic about mouse parts than they ever were about fish or worms! I told a friend about this, and she tried it with a litter of garter snakes in 2004; within two weeks, most of them were eating mouse parts.

Not every garter snake will eat mice; I’ve known some adults that would resist everything but live fish, for example. But if you can get them on mice right from the outset, it will be easier for you and healthier for the snakes.

Rule #7: Feed them separately but be efficient about it. Even if you house them together, you need to feed them separately for all the usual reasons: food fights and accidental cannibalism, one snake hogging all the food (especially with live fish, where one greedy snake can eat them all before the other ones notice). But when you have a couple dozen snakes, feeding them individually can mean that either you spend all day feeding them or you spend a lot of money on a bunch of feeding containers.

Jennifer and I found a way to speed up the process by using deli-cup containers. We set out enough containers for the snakes of one cage and put the food in each (by this point, usually a half pinky), and then took the snakes out of the cage and put one in each container. Before long the snakes were well used to this procedure and frequently had clamped down on their food before Jennifer closed the lid on them. While they fed, we cleaned their cage. By the time that was done, some were already finished and ready to go back in. Repeat for each cage. It’s more labour-intensive than simply dropping a plateful of food in each cage, but it’s definitely better for the snakes: it’s safer and makes sure every snake has a shot at the food. Feeding individually is always going to be time-consuming, but we’ve been able to make it about as quick and efficient as we can, I think.

Unfortunately, by the time I’d figured all of this out, we had almost completely run out of baby garter snakes to experiment on: each of our breeding pairs lost one member due to old age or disease, so we haven’t had a fresh litter of garter snakes since 2002. But we’re raising up a trio of checkered garter snakes at the moment; the females are still pretty small, and I don’t think they’ll be ready to breed by next year, but with any luck I’ll be able to test the Seven Rules on a couple of new litters in 2008.

The herpetocultural literature on the raising of young garter snakes is surprisingly scant. Apart from some issues of diet, the care of adult garter snakes is little different from that of any other medium-sized North American colubrid. Books on the subject either deal with neonate garter snake care in very general terms, or treat it as similar to that of other snakes. But this is not the case. There are some definite differences in the care of newborn garter snakes, especially in terms of feeding and housing. As a result, when my garter snakes started breeding in the spring of 2001, I was not prepared for some of the surprises their offspring had in store for me.

What I propose to do in this article is to share what I’ve learned from raising a few litters¹ of garter snakes, plus a few neonates that I did not breed, but acquired when they were very young. This is by no means scientific or definitive, but anecdotal. It’s merely what I’ve observed. If your observations differ, by all means share them: at this point, we need as many observations as we can get, if we’re to understand better how to look after our charges.

I’d like to begin with a few observations about breeding, which is obviously the necessary first step. In my limited experience, I have not found garter snake breeding to be at all difficult: every attempt at pairing has been successful. All I’ve done is either keep the breeding pair in the same cage at all times, in the case of my pair of Red-sided Garter Snakes, Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis, or introduce them in the standard manner for colubrids, in the case of my pair of Wandering Garter Snakes, Thamnophis elegans vagrans, which I kept separately for fear of ophiophagy (which is well documented for that taxon).

Nevertheless, breeding was far from routine. My male T. s. parietalis was resolutely indifferent to mating season. When I first introduced him to the female in mid-October 2000, he pounced immediately. Intromission occurred after two weeks of intense and dramatic courtship; courting behavior was observed for weeks thereafter, and he refused food for nearly two months. They were artificially brumated over winter, at temperatures between 12 and 15°C. The following March, I introduced him to a second female T. s. parietalis owned by a friend. They were in the cage together for only a few hours; mating this time was immediate. Both females gave birth in late May.

The following July, entirely out of season, he mated with my female again. She did not give birth until June 13, 2002, when she delivered a litter of 42 babies — a total of eleven months between mating and birth, four of which were spent in hibernation. Clearly, female garter snakes are more than capable of retaining sperm until ovulation. From what I’ve been able to observe, female garter snakes ovulate almost immediately after coming out of hibernation, and give birth approximately two and a half months after conception: my T. s. parietalis gave birth a month later in 2002 than she had in 2001, but she had also come out of hibernation a month later. Similarly, my female T. e. vagrans, which had mated in mid-April 2002, delivered seven babies on July 3, 2002.

The birth process itself takes very little time. I was able to witness — and photograph! — the birth of my 2002 litter of 42 T. s. parietalis, which took less than a couple of hours. The babies emerge from their birth sacs within minutes, some more quickly than others: at least one baby was breaking out of its sac before the sac had finished emerging from the mother! ²

The babies’ first shed occurs almost immediately. The skin is extremely thin and ephemeral compared with that of other colubrids, and can easily be lost in the general mess and snake traffic that occurs during birth. This contradicts Perlowin (1992), who writes that garter snakes shed seven to 10 days after birth, like other snakes. Because my first litter of T. s. parietalis, in 2001, was born when I was away doing field and conservation work on Pelee Island, I wasn’t able to observe the immediate shedding, and assumed, based on what I had read, that the snakes would shed after a week or two. I ended up waiting for weeks for a first shed that had already taken place, when I should have been trying to feed them.

I’ve had considerable trouble getting baby garter snakes to feed. Part of this may be due to retained yolk. From what I’ve seen from my own litters and those of friends, T. sirtalis tends to have large litters of small babies, whereas other species — in my case, T. e. vagrans and T. sauritus septentrionalis — seem to have smaller litters, but the babies are larger. My T. e. vagrans babies in particular appeared to have considerable yolk reserves and were in no hurry to begin eating.

On the other hand, they may have had some difficulty recognizing that what I was offering was food. At the outset, the easiest food items for me to offer were chopped nightcrawler, Lumbricus terrestris, and pieces of ocean perch fillet, Sebastes marinus. Neither was accepted with any regularity, which suggested that the snakes preferred food items that moved: fish fillet was obviously non-ambulatory, and the nightcrawlers were so large that pieces cut small enough to feed to the snakes were too small to even twitch.

In an urban environment, finding appropriate food items was problematic. Smaller earthworms were usually accepted with relish, but without a garden they were hard to acquire. I took to carrying plastic containers with me on my walks to and from work when it rained, so that I could collect worms from the roads and sidewalks, and asking friends to send me their garden denizens. Live fish were also accepted, but they were expensive, difficult to acquire in bulk, and required long bus trips to buy them, since neither I nor my partner at the time owned a car.

The other issue was simply one of quantity. Fifty baby garter snakes can eat a copious amount, particularly if they’re eating platies and earthworms. A single snake can eat several fish or worms. Multiply that by fifty, and then two or three times per week, and the supply issue becomes monstrous. It was difficult and time-consuming to provide enough, and in many cases we simply couldn’t. Eventually, they grew large enough to take nightcrawler pieces, which simplified things, but I lost quite a few in 2002 before they got to that stage, simply because I couldn’t provide them with enough nourishment. ³

A more serious setback came in the form of internal parasites: tapeworms or roundworms. A single bad batch of feeder fish bought from a pet store in late 2001, I now believe, had a devastating impact on my natricine collection, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. Many snakes ended up with a tapeworm infestation in their lungs that eventually killed them. I want to emphasize eventually, because snakes were dying from this a full two years later, and were frequently in apparently good health until I found them suddenly upside-down one morning. Several of the babies I had been raising succumbed; I ended up offering free replacements to customers who had bought snakes that subsequently, and inexplicably, died.

My original strategy had been to feed them worms and fish until they were large enough to take pinky mice or pinky parts. This was both labour intensive and riskier to the snakes’ health than I was comfortable with. And, as I’ve said, some baby garters were not enthusiastic about their traditional diets. Ironically, several of my T. e. vagrans babies were finicky eaters until they were converted to mice, at which point they fed voraciously.

So, when I acquired a couple of neonate Eastern Garter Snakes, T. s. sirtalis, in late 2002, I tried something different: rather than waiting until the point where I would normally convert them to pinkies, I tried pinky parts — unscented — immediately. To my great surprise, it worked: they ate without hesitation. This repeated itself the following year, when I acquired two Checkered Garter Snakes, T. m. marcianus, that were so small that they could not have been more than a month old. Again, I tried very small mouse parts, which they ate. No scenting was required.

Not every garter snake can be converted to a mouse diet, but I began to think that for those that could be converted, it could happen at a much earlier age. Doing so might address both the initial reluctance to feed and the difficulties in providing them with enough food so that they could grow properly.

Denise Loving, having listened to me talk about this, tried this for herself with her litter of nine Blue-striped Garter Snakes, T. sirtalis similis, born in July 2004. From the outset she offered them both worms and pinky parts. Within two weeks, she reported that seven of them were eating lightly scented pinky parts (pers. comm.). Compared to the lack of success I’d had in 2001 and 2002 at that stage, this was quite encouraging. Unfortunately, I don’t have any breedable pairs of garter snakes at the moment, so it will be a while before I can test this hypothesis again.

I’m a strong advocate of converting garter snakes to a mouse-based diet generally (Crowe 2000; Crowe and Hathaway 2000), but it appears to be especially useful for rearing young garters in captivity. The 2002 litters suffered no mortalities after they were converted to mice in October of that year: any that occurred happened before that time. Similarly, I haven’t lost a single garter snake baby since that I had started on a mouse diet. I think that the benefits, in terms of greater nourishment per feeding and a parasite-free food source, are obvious.

Having spent so much time on feeding, I should say a word or two about housing. For ease of cleaning, I use paper towelling as substrate: it should come as no surprise to garter snake keepers that several babies, housed together, can rapidly foul their cages. My caging for young garters is otherwise the same as for other colubrids, with one exception. Small snakes seem especially prone to dessication: this applies to adults of small species (e.g. Storeria) as much as neonate garter snakes. I lost five young garter snakes during a heat wave in the summer of 2001; since then, I’ve made a point of providing young garters’ cages with a humidity gradient, which can be as simple as a patch of moistened sphagnum moss or, more elaborately, a humidity box. It’s a useful precaution if your home’s temperatures soar into the mid-thirties Celsius.

The general consensus seems to be to house them together, rather than separately. Philippe Blais does so, and finds that garter snakes housed in such a manner are calmer than they would be if housed separately (pers. comm.; Blais and Crowe 2000; but cf. Rossi and Rossi 2003). My own observations confirm this: garter snakes housed individually tend to be more nervous and whippier than those housed in groups. It seems a natural thing to do, given Thamnophis’s tendency to aggregate in the wild, but there are some caveats to be aware of.

With some snakes, of course, their cannibalistic tendencies require separate housing: as a precaution, I keep Wandering and Checkered Garters one to a cage. Also, I don’t mix species or subspecies. On the other hand, I’ve kept as many as 10 or 11 neonates in a cage 40 cm × 20 cm, and 24 neonates in a cage 60 cm × 30 cm, without incident. Fortunately, as they grew, I was able to sell a few of them and as a result keep fewer per cage; I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t sold any of them!

One drawback to housing them collectively is that it becomes more difficult to monitor their food intake. Hungry natricines, as a rule, do not ration themselves, and the more aggressive feeders will leave none for the others: 30 fish fed to 30 snakes may end up in the stomachs of only a few. Unless you’re able to tell by sight which snake is which (an unlikely prospect in most cases), it’s impossible under such circumstances to tell who’s eating and who isn’t. The second issue is one of food fights, where two snakes try to grab the same food item. Some snakes are sensible enough to let go before they’re swallowed by a sibling, but it does happen, and separating two (or more!) snakes who’ve attacked the same fish or piece of worm can be a challenging — and stressful! — experience.

Housing them collectively, but feeding them individually, is therefore the best option. My partner and I use plastic food containers, and we’ve gotten quite efficient at it. Once the snakes learn that being put into a deli container means that they’re being fed, it’s usually not difficult to coax them inside. With a bit of practice, feeding even a large number of baby garter snakes can become a matter of routine.

Notes

1. Three litters of Red-sided Garter Snakes, Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis, two in 2001 (N = 26, 24) and one in 2002 (N = 42); one litter of Northern Ribbon Snakes, Thamnophis sauritus septentrionalis (N = 9); and one litter of Wandering Garter Snakes, Thamnophis elegans vagrans (N = 7).
2. View the photographs of this birth online.
3. The Northern Ribbon Snakes were not offered nightcrawlers.

References

QUYON — Mozambique may be a far-off country in southern Africa, but that hasn’t stopped the kids at Onslow Elementary School from reaching out to help.

In only eight days, they raised enough money to buy and send 150 kits of school supplies to children in the northern Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique.

“They’re not as fortunate as us,” said Grade 6 student Bailey Anderson, who is one of four student organizers. “We felt that we could do something, so we did.”

The Onslow students did it as part of Project Love, an initiative of CODE, an Ottawa-based organization that promotes literacy and education in developing countries.

Through Project Love, which was begun 17 years ago in London, Ont., CODE expects to distribute 70,000 school kits from 483 Canadian schools this year.

Each kit contains a pencil, eraser, ruler and notebook — along with a personal note from the student who assembled the kit.

The Onslow kids spent Thursday morning assembling the kits.

Grade 2 student Keegan Picard, 7, read his message to his class.

“I hope you like the gifts we gave you,” he said.

The kids raised $376 through a series of projects: a movie day where they made and sold popcorn at 25 cents a bag, a bake sale, and candygrams — bags of candy bought for someone else for 25 cents. They sold 180 bags.

In the end, Onslow’s 120 students raised a total of $376 — enough to buy 150 school kits and pay to ship them to Mozambique.

Shipping the kits overseas is both expensive and time-consuming, said Garth Brooks, CODE’s project manager for Project Love.

The kits will be collected from across Canada and warehoused until next summer, when they will be shipped to Mozambique just before the start of the school year.

Seventy-five per cent of a kit’s cost is eaten up by shipping, said Brooks. CODE works with local agencies to distribute the kits.

Normally a Valentine’s Day activity, Project Love was also fitting for the Christmas holidays, said Brooks.

“You’ve picked a good day because Christmas is a time of giving,” he said.

Brooks told a school assembly Thursday a little bit about Mozambique, where most people live on less than $1 a day, the life expectancy is 36 and the literacy rate is only 44 per cent.

A former Portuguese colony that became independent in 1975, Mozambique suffered through decades of civil war until a peace agreement was signed in 1992.

“I’d love to see the looks on their faces when they open their packages and read your letters,” said Brooks.

SHAWVILLE — The good news is that three Yuk Yuk’s stand-up comedians were in town Saturday night to perform at a fundraiser for the Shawville RA.

The bad news? They had to come in on Hwy. 148 to do it.

“Is that a paved-over roller-coaster or what?” quipped headliner Pete Zedlacher. “And the curves — is that a highway or a luge run?”

And then there were the road signs.

“There aren’t any,” said opener and master of ceremonies, Ottawa-based comic Mike Beatty, who claimed that the fundraiser was “so you can buy a sign to the RA centre.”

There was an element of truth in this — Jason Laurans, another Ottawa-based comedian and the middle act in the program, did in fact get lost trying to find the RA hall.

A running gag throughout the evening was the amenities available in Shawville — or lack thereof. When the comedians discovered that there was no KFC or Tim Horton’s in town, Zedlacher announced that he was running for mayor on a platform of bringing Tim’s to Shawville.

Surprisingly shrewd local jokes were combined with well-worn routines as the audience of about 100 laughed at the comedians’ routines, much of which cannot be reprinted in a family newspaper.

Laurans’s set included material on the difference between French and Québécois accents, men sharing hotel rooms, and trying to get a 1981 K car started.

Zedlacher, a Toronto-based comic born in Wawa, Ont. who has had a television special, produced astonishing facial contortions during a dead-on Arnold Schwartzenegger impression.

Zedlacher performed in Shawville the last time Yuk Yuk’s came to town (for a fundraiser for the arena sound system).

He proudly bills himself as the first comic to entertain troops in Afghanistan. He drew applause when he talked about supporting the troops overseas.

He pointed out that while Canadian troops in Afghanistan had to wear green fatigues, the U.S. troops were wearing desert camouflage.

“Those pussies are hiding,” he said.

As with all good stand-up routines, interaction with the audience was a key part of the performance, whose victims included the owner of a 1985 Olds Delta 88 and a certain Equity reporter who couldn’t take a simple picture without someone cracking wise about it.

“Live is so much more interactive,” said Laurans after the performance. “There’s nothing like live for that. It’s jokes but there’s more than that.”

QUYON — An engineered landfill site proposed for North Onslow was the subject of heated debate between residents opposed to the plan and the mayor and council supporting it at a public consultation meeting held last week.

While supporters maintained that the project would eliminate a potential health hazard at the current landfill and be a financial benefit to the community, opponents argued that any benefits would be outweighed by the sheer size of the project, and worried that residents would lose control once the contract had been signed.

About 120 people attended the public consultation held at the Quyon Lions Hall Nov. 25, where the mayor and councillors of the Municipality of Pontiac and the contractor, Denis Rouleau, president of LDC Gestion et Services environnementeaux, tried to make their case and answer audience questions.

MoP Mayor Bruce Campbell opened the meeting by making his case for the engineered landfill.

For Mayor Campbell, the landfill addresses two problems looming on the horizon: forthcoming provincial regulations that will make the current trench landfill on Wolf Lake Road more expensive to operate; and the potential that pollutants leaking from the dump site could contaminate the groundwater.

“Doing nothing does not mean that nothing changes,” said Campbell, who estimated that maintaining the status quo would cost ratepayers an extra $138 per year.

Cleaning up the site would cost $1.5 million or more, he said.

Under the proposal, LDC would clean up the current landfill and replace it with an engineered landfill, which it would operate on a for-profit basis, taking in garbage from across the region.

Controversy erupted earlier this year when it was suggested that residential garbage from Gatineau might be taken to the site, but Rouleau assured the meeting that that option was no longer on the table.

“We’re coming to you very early in the project,” said Rouleau. “A lot of elements are not confirmed yet.”

MoP residents would get free non-commercial access to the dump, and the MoP would be entitled to a one-third share of the profits.

The deal would last until 850,000 cubic metres of the site’s 900,000-cubic-metre capacity had been used, or for 20 years, whichever came first; Rouleau projected between 11 and 17 years. At that point, the remaining capacity — about 20 years of the MoP’s garbage output — would be turned over to the MoP. LDC would continue to monitor the site for an additional 30 years.

Details of the proposal, along with questions and answers about the technical aspects of the project, have been covered in recent columns by Katharine Fletcher in The Equity and on the weekly paper’s web site.

Campbell argued that the proposal was a win-win situation for all concerned. Garbage expenses would be kept down and an unsecured landfill site would be cleaned up.

“We negotiated ourselves a good deal for all parties and we’re proud of it,” said Campbell.

For Rouleau, whose company stands to make a projected profit of $8 million over the project’s lifetime, public support was crucial to the project’s success. With the public behind the project, LDC could receive a certificate to operate the site within two and a half years, rather than the five years it normally takes.

Some residents were concerned about the extra traffic on the road that the new landfill would generate, or the smell, or the risk to their well water. Nor was everyone convinced that the new landfill would be any safer than the current site.

“All landfills leak. All liners leak,” said Wolf Lake Road resident Vladimir Tolstoy after the meeting.

Tolstoy was not satisfied with the assurances that the engineered landfill technology would prevent contaminants from reaching the groundwater.

“We have no idea what this is going to be like 100 years from now. We have no control over what goes in there,” he said, pointing out that people put questionable things in dumpsters.

The scale of the project was another issue. Tolstoy pointed out that trench landfills were only legal in communities of fewer than 2,000 people, and only when they were more than 50 kilometres from a technical landfill site.

“The scale of the increase is something like 50 to 75 fold,” he said, arguing that the risk posed by a small trench landfill was much smaller.

“Nobody wants 50 to 75 times bigger,” said Tolstoy. “That’s scary.”

If there is a leak, the pollutants would hit the groundwater “thousands of times faster than our little dump now,” he said.

“Eventually this will leak,” he warned.

Rouleau conceded that a leak was a remote possibility.

“That’s why we don’t want it!” one resident shouted in response.

Another resident agreed with Tolstoy: “I think cleaning up 33,000 (cubic metres) would be a lot easier than cleaning up 900,000.”

Given the duration of the project, Tolstoy said he wanted more consultation.

“Look, you’re making a decision that’s 52 years, give or take,” he said. “It’s really hard to fathom that my children’s children’s children could be born with a birth defect.”

“I think you need more openness, more forums, more people involved,” said Tolstoy.

Tolstoy also suggested that any of the profits the MoP might be entitled to might evaporate through creative accounting.

“Who knows? There might never be a profit,” he said. “I think the councillors and mayors may have been duped.”

For his part, Tolstoy said he preferred shutting down the dump altogether and trucking the garbage to Lachute or another site, even if that meant an increase in taxes.

At the meeting, Tolstoy presented a petition with 230 signatures complaining that MoP council was rushing into the deal.

“I think that shows you that people are not happy,” he said.

At times during the meeting, both Campbell and Rouleau struggled to make their points.

Campbell, sometimes shouting to make himself heard, emphasized the benefits and pointed out that the alternatives would cost more: “It will cost more to monitor the current site. It will cost more to send it away.”

“The site you have now is more dangerous than an engineered site,” said Rouleau.

By the end of the meeting, Rouleau was somewhat philosophical.

“I think I need to sit down and reevaluate everything,” he said. “Do we go ahead or not? We wanted them to express their opinions, and they expressed their opinions.”

Rouleau said that if public opinion was solidly against the project, he would not pursue it — he would not get a certificate in the face of public opposition.

Pontiac’s high schools have not fared well in the latest annual report on Quebec high school performance.

The report, titled Report Card on Quebec’s Secondary Schools: 2003 Edition, was jointly produced by the Montreal Economic Institute and the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. This is the fourth year that the institutes have produced this report.

École secondaire Sieur de Coulonge finished 219th, St. Alphonsus High School (now Dr. Wilbert Keon School) finished 309th, John Paul II High School finished 416th and Pontiac High School finished 435th.

The study graded 455 schools across the province on a number of factors, such as examination marks and the percentage of students who graduate on time.

The report was based on publicly available data for the 2001-2002 school year. The report’s researchers performed a statistical analysis and assigned a score from one to 10 to each school.

But the report is not without its critics.

Officials from Pontiac’s two school boards argue that the report focuses too much on performance in tests.

“The report leaves out some important elements of what a school is about,” said Kevin Drysdale, director of education for the Western Quebec School Board.

Drysdale pointed to socialization as a key — though difficult to measure — role played by schools.

For Marlène Thonnard, director general of the Commission scolaire des Hauts-Bois-de-l’Outaouais, success is more than how well a student performs on a provincial exam.

Success, she argued, could be measured by whether a student stays in school.

“The more students we keep in the school, maybe we won’t have as high results, but they’re still in school,” said Thonnard.

In addition, Drysdale said that because the report counts a student who moves to another province as a dropout rather than a transfer, an English-language school near the Ontario border would be penalized more than, say, a French-language school in the middle of the province.

“There is movement (across the border) that is not taken into account,” said Drysdale. “We believe it would be significantly higher than in the French population.”

Another issue is “school choice” and whether private and public schools can be compared.

The Fraser Institute, a conservative think-tank, is a long-time advocate of school choice — which, in a nutshell, means giving parents the ability to send their children to private school with financial support from the government.

The report groups public and private schools together; of the top 50 schools, only six are public schools.

Both Thonnard and Drysdale said that it’s unfair to group private and public schools in the same category.

“(Private schools) select their students. We don’t select. We take everybody,” said Thonnard.

In particular, public schools must take care of special-needs children.

For example, 14.4 per cent of Pontiac High’s students are special needs students, while private schools generally have few to none, Drysdale said.

“This really is apples and oranges, and that’s unfair,” said Drysdale.

“We have to look after those students,” said Thonnard.

And, Thonnard pointed out, school choice is a moot point in rural areas, where there is only one school for miles around.

Drysdale concurred. “It’s a non starter for someone living in Noranda,” he said.

Finally, there is some debate as to how much impact a school really makes on a student’s performance.

Thonnard pointed to a study by Jean-Guy Blais, a professor of education at the Université de Montréal, which concluded that the school is a factor in only 17 per cent of the results; the students themselves determine the remaining 83 per cent.

Blais wrote the study in direct response to the Report Card.

“I don’t think (the Report Card) helps the cause,” said Thonnard.

For his part, however, Drysdale said that indicators are still useful.

“It’s not the whole picture. But it’s an important part of one picture,” he said.

Drysdale points out that the 2001-2002 data upon which the report is based is already 18 months old, and that their internal numbers show an improvement in student performance.

“Any of your governing boards of your schools will see (the results),” he said.

For example, Drysdale promised that Pontiac High School will show an improvement in the 2004 report.

“They surpassed the average mark in their (Secondary V) examinations,” he said.

Drysdale predicted higher scores for all of the WQSB’s schools, which he credits to the implementation of school success plans by the board in 2001.

As for the school choice argument, Drysdale said he was much more interested in improving existing schools.

“We’re not interested in a competition of schools against one another,” he said. “What I’m interested in is growth in each of our schools.”

Francis Kempton Morris’s family first heard the news by telegram.

“Kemp,” a native of Sheenboro, was a gunnery sergeant in the Royal Canadian Air Force. On the night of Nov. 18, 1943, his plane went on a bombing raid over Mannheim, Germany.

The plane never returned.

He had just turned 21 years old on the 15th.

“They sent word — we got a telegram at the end of November that he was presumed missing,” says Grace Bryson, Kemp’s younger sister.

She remembers feeling “just shock” when her family heard the news.

“We never thought that this would happen,” she said.

Kemp and Grace were the sixth and fifth youngest, respectively, of a family of 16 children. They were 18 months apart in age.

“We always had a party,” says Grace, “because there were so many of us. We were an Irish-Catholic family.”

Grace, now 79, lives in Pembroke, where she quilts for her grandchildren and for church missions. She remembers going to school in Sheenboro with her brother.

“They used to think we were twins, even though there were 18 months between us,” she says.

Like his older brother, Melvin, who joined the navy, Kemp enlisted, joining the RCAF in high school in 1941. Two other brothers tried to sign up, but were turned down for health reasons.

He went overseas in June 1943 and became an air gunner; his last mission was his 11th.

“We just thought that … nine more flights and he’d be home,” says Grace.

The family waited for word about what had happened to Kemp. Then, in January, they received word that his plane had been shot down and that he had been killed.

A letter from the RCAF’s casualties officer, dated Jan. 17, 1944, confirmed the news, saying that Kemp had been captured and “underwent an operation for gunshot wounds to his abdomen from which he failed to recover.”

Subsequent letters to the family revealed more and more details about what had happened to Kemp after he had been shot down.

Another letter from the casualties officer said that, based on Red Cross information, when Kemp had been captured, he was taken to Ebernach, Germany. He had died at 9:45 p.m. on Nov. 20, 1943, “with a Catholic priest at his bedside.”

The letter also enclosed a short, handwritten note from Kemp that he had written before going into surgery.

But not all the letters came from the casualties officer’s desk.

The first remarkable letter came from Father Walter Hauth. He was an assistant priest in Cochem, Germany, and was one of two priests who had administered Kemp’s last rites. He wrote, in English, to Kemp’s father on Sept. 17, 1946.

“Your dear son smiled when the priest came in,” he wrote. “We had a nice, little conversation. I can’t tell you how he was pleased when I heard his confession and gave him the blessing.”

Three days after Kemp died, he gave the funeral mass.

“Oh, I know I can’t give you a word of consolation, I can’t give you your dear son again, but I can tell you that he died in peace of God.”

Two letters, apparently unrelated, followed from Bruno Bous, an ambulance driver who received a call to pick up a young, wounded Canadian airman.

Bous’s letter added another piece to the puzzle of what had happened to Kemp. He wrote that he picked Kemp up from a doctor’s private infirmary and transported him to the hospital in Cochem.

Bous also was able to provide some information about where Kemp had been buried.

“Mr. Morris was buried with full military honours in the cemetery of my native city Cochem. His grave is cared for and there is a cross and flowers. It bears the number 224. If you wish, I will send you a snapshot of the grave, and also of the monastery and the hospital where Mr. Morris died. Please let me know.”

Finally, Bous wrote that he had found a blue cap that belonged to Kemp, and offered to send it to the Morrises.

Bous wrote again in Jan. 1948, after the Morrises had replied asking for more information. He promised to find out as much as he could. He contacted the hospital director and said that he would find the surgeons who had operated on Kemp.

Bous’s efforts bore fruit when, on Feb. 13, 1948, Dr. Peter Dürr, one of the surgeons who had operated on Kemp, wrote a four-page letter describing the night Kemp’s plane had been shot down and how he had died.

Dürr provided the Morrises with the most information yet about their son. He described the night of the bombing raid, and may have been a witness to Kemp’s plane being shot down. He also included, to the best of his memory, Kemp’s own account to him of being shot down.

Because Dürr could speak English, he assisted the hospital’s chief surgeon in treating Kemp’s injuries.

“At last we came to the agreement that the only help that could be given to your son would be an operation, in order to see which of the internal parts were injured. Unfortunately he had been wounded 12 hours ago. There was less hope to save his life, in case the intestines should be wounded.”

In the event, Kemp had been too badly injured to be saved. Nothing more could be done for him.

“In case he had been turned in right after the accident it had been possible to save him,” wrote Dürr. “But now it was too late. His injury resulted in an inflammation of the peritoneum. The process of the inflammation could not be stopped any more.”

“Everybody of us did his best to help him,” Dürr added.

Priest, ambulance driver, doctor — all were able, even willing, to tell the Morrises what they knew about their son. Even though Kemp had been on the other side and even though he had been involved in a bombing raid above their homes the night before.

Grace remembers the letters well.

“They were very touching,” she says.

Indeed, the family was moved enough to send CARE packages to Germany — sent, she says, to the man looking after her brother’s grave.

A number of private relief efforts were started after the war to send packages to Germany; official efforts were focused on non-German survivors, says Angelika Sauer, a history professor at Texas Lutheran University who specializes in postwar Canadian-German relations.

“They organized clothing drives and collections,” says Sauer. “I seem to remember that they used the CARE program extensively because it was the easiest way to distribute relief in Germany.”

Not only that, but the family sponsored, through a church-sponsored farm placement arrangement, a young German man to come to their farm to work for a year.

As for Kemp, his body was moved to a British Military Cemetery at Rheinberg, Germany. The RCAF’s casualties officer confirmed the exact location of his grave in a letter dated Jan. 12, 1949.

In July 2002, Grace and her daughter took time out from an organized group trip to Ireland to visit Kemp’s gravesite in Rheinberg.

There were flowers at every gravesite, says Grace.

“You couldn’t help but cry when you got there,” she says.

SHAWVILLE — With additional funds coming at almost the last possible minute, the Shawville-Clarendon Library is set to begin construction immediately.

Clarendon Mayor Jack Lang and Shawville Mayor Albert Armstrong received word from Pontiac MNA Charlotte L’Écuyer Thursday evening that their application for an increased Resource Region grant had been accepted.

“I was speechless for five or 10 seconds with Charlotte,” said Armstrong.

The new grant increases the provincial funding for the library to $508,231 from $276,484. Each municipality will also kick in an additional $44,000, bringing the total contribution from each to about $150,000.

It has not yet been determined how the municipalities will come up with the extra money. Multi-year budgeting and borrowing are two options.

The additional funds mean that the library’s design will not have to be scaled back in order to proceed.

“We didn’t cut anything,” said Lang.

The funds may not have come a moment too soon. DLS Construction’s bid was only good for 60 days after the Aug. 27 deadline for tenders. It was set to expire Sunday, which meant that for all practical purposes the contract needed to be signed no later than Friday.

“It was getting to be nerve-wracking,” said Lang.

“We were 99 per cent sure we were going to get it, but you can’t go on 99, you want 100,” he added.

Armstrong agreed. “It was very stressful,” he said.

Armstrong and Lang were in Aylmer to sign the contract Friday. Had that not happened, the bidding process would have had to begin all over again — and, with higher winter construction costs, the bids would quite likely have been even higher.

The library ran into trouble in September when the bids came in much higher than originally budgeted for.

Construction costs had risen since they had budgeted for the library.

“The prices had escalated 30 to 40 per cent on building materials,” said Armstrong.

Shawville and Clarendon officials scrambled to find a way to bridge the gap between budget and bid before the end of the year, or else risk losing their Resource Region grant.

Afraid that the library was in jeopardy, more than 30 library supporters packed the Sept. 23 meetings of both Shawville and Clarendon councils to press them to find a solution. Since then, the work has been focused on getting more funds.

Armstrong and Lang credit L’Écuyer — “without her it wouldn’t be realized,” said Armstrong — the CLD, the Pontiac MRC and the Ministry of Regional Economic Development for putting together the new budget and helping make the new funds possible.

Word that the library had been given the go-ahead spread quickly through the community and became the town’s worst-kept secret.

“I am so delighted,” said Joan Conrod on Saturday. She had been telephoned Thursday evening with the news.

“I’m extremely grateful for the work of Albert Armstrong, Jack Lang and Sandra Murray, who refused to accept defeat and fought for it,” she said.

Janet McCord agreed.

“I’m thrilled,” she said. “We need it desperately.

“Some people will say it’s just a bunch of books, but I want to look beyond that.

“It’s a public building. It’s not just a library.”

An official sod-turning ceremony has been scheduled for next Monday morning.

SHAWVILLE — A 25-year-old fire truck came back to the Shawville-Clarendon Fire Department Oct. 10 with a brand new tank and better equipment.

The truck, a tanker that can bring 1,300 gallons to the site of a fire, was purchased by the Municipality of Clarendon in December 1978. It was that municipality’s first fire truck.

Its tank has been completely replaced.

“The tank had been leaking,” said Clarendon Mayor Jack Lang.

And, thanks to the elimination of several 90-degree angles in the piping, the pumps can now deliver 420 gallons per minute at 150 psi, instead of 225 gallons per minute.

Cabinets along the sides and back have been replaced for better organization, and now come with sliding doors instead of opening out.

In fact, virtually everything past the cab has been replaced except for the chassis, which is in good shape despite the truck’s age.

Not a lot of miles get put on a fire truck — after a quarter century, the odometer reads only slightly more than 13,500 km.

The refit cost a total of $69,809.15 — an amount that had been budgeted for by Clarendon council.

“This investment is a long-term investment,” said Clarendon Coun. Mavis Hanna. “It’s money well spent.”

Clarendon is responsible for the truck under the 1997 fire fighting agreement between Shawville and Clarendon.

“This truck was too good to junk,” said SCFC Chief Lee Laframboise. “(It’s) worth a lot more than they spent.”

The truck originally cost $40,000 in 1978.

While the truck had been away getting refurbished since July, the SCFD has been making do with its other tanker truck, a newer model bought two years ago with a 3,000-gallon capacity.

With both trucks in service, the SCFD can bring a total of 4,300 gallons to a fire immediately, and then alternate between the trucks as one goes to refill its tanks.

“It’s more than adequate preparation to fight fires in the community,” said Hanna.

Tanker trucks are vital in rural areas where there are no water pipes and no hydrants: firefighters must bring their water with them, and then refill their trucks from nearby water sources.

SHAWVILLE — T’ai chi classes have started up again at the Shawville Lions Hall.

This is the third year that the slow-moving Chinese martial art, which is popular as a form of low-impact exercise, has been taught in Shawville.

Classes began Tuesday evening, Oct. 7 and continue weekly. They cost $50 for a set of eight classes, which are offered several times a year.

About 25 to 30 students normally take the class, says Louise Ahern, who handles the organization and registration.

Instructor Tim Gordon, who says he’s been teaching t’ai chi for eight or nine years, is impressed with the students here, most of whom have been regulars since the beginning.

“(It’s a) large, enthusiastic crowd. I love coming here to teach,” says Gordon, who lives in Burnstown, Ont., south of Renfrew.

For the first time, Gordon is offering an intermediate class for those regulars who, after several series of classes, have gotten enough experience under their belts.

On the first night of classes, Gordon ran the students, newcomers and regulars alike — including an Equity reporter with no small amount of trepidation — through some of the more basic moves. After that, he took the regulars through a series of 108 moves for the intermediate course.

One newcomer expressed amazement that she would be able to remember them all.

Norbert Senf, who lives in Greermount, has been taking the classes since the beginning. He signed up out of curiosity and a desire to stay active.

“I sort of knew what t’ai chi was, but I wasn’t really familiar with it,” he says.

But after a few classes, Senf really took to it.

“I liked it a lot,” he says. “I’m getting older, and I’m starting to feel my boddy. It’s a really good way to stay loose, do some stretching.”

Senf enjoys the support they get from doing it as a group, and the confidence that comes with repetition and practice.

Gordon suggests another reason for the classes’ appeal.

“I think it’s a cultural adventure. It’s kind of a unique thing to be doing,” he says.

Regional field guides generally beat the Audubon or Peterson guides hands-down when it comes to descriptions of local ranges, subspecies, and habitat. Some guides provide only limited information in the interest of keeping their size down, sacrificing their usefulness as a reference for their pocketability (e.g. MacCullough’s ROM Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Ontario). Other guides provide authoritative information in rich, comprehensive quantities, but in a thick book that is kind of hard to carry with you — they’re more textbooks than field guides (e.g. Harding’s Amphibians and Reptiles of the Great Lakes Region or Werler and Dixon’s Texas Snakes). Both methods produce good field guides; it’s just a matter of which kind of guide you need: pocketable or definitive.

Alan St. John’s very fine Reptiles of the Northwest manages to maintain its pocketability (and therefore its usefulness in the field) without sacrificing as much, in terms of information, as other guides. It does skimp a bit on information about the animals themselves; facts about their diet, reproduction and behaviour are condensed into a paragraph each. But this is by no means a meagre book. Instead, it is a field guide worthy of the name that focuses on where and how to find reptiles in northwestern North America and how to identify them. It provides very good subspecies data — a rare thing nowadays, when it’s fashionable to deprecate subspecies in favour of elevating them to full species or writing them off as undiagnosable variants. For example, since I breed the rascals, I was glad to learn how to determine the different subspecies of Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer). And, in addition to excellent, full-colour range maps, there is photography so beautifully staged and lit that you want to buy them as prints and frame them — including such gems as photos of tiny baby horned lizards (Phrynosoma) and of a Red-spotted Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis concinnus) swallowing a very toxic Rough-skinned Newt (Taricha granulosa).

Most of all, I enjoyed the field notes at the end of each species description, in which St. John tells a personal story about finding the animal in question in the wild (often for the purpose of photographing it for this book). These entertaining tales make Reptiles of the Northwest one of the most unique field guides I have encountered in years, and reminds us that a field guide is really about searching for, encountering and interacting with animals in the field — and this point is ably illustrated by the often-funny photos of snakes dangling off someone’s ear or lizards biting someone’s hand. Highly recommended.

Ontarians have not had a field guide to their reptiles and amphibians for some time, at least not since Bob Johnson’s Familiar Reptiles and Amphibians of Ontario (1989). Whereas Johnson’s little book was illustrated with black-and-white sketches that may or may not have resembled the actual animal in question, this new pocket guide is a showcase for excellent herp photography, giving each species native to Ontario three full-colour photographs on the facing page of each written description.

It’s important to remember that this is a field guide, focused on the identification of wildlife in the field, and as such is not terribly in-depth — after all, it’s supposed to fit in your pocket! Each species is limited to a page of description and a page of photographs, a format which, for the most part, works rather well. Information is basic (identification, habitat, diet, reproduction), concise and, for the most part, accurate.

But brevity can be risky, and errors can sometimes creep in. Describing Butler’s Garter Snakes as “more slender” than Common Garter Snakes (p. 130) is, in my experience, a mistake; and the description of the Fowler’s Toad’s call as simply “shorter” than that of the American Toad (p. 68) is not correct either. Nor is there any distinction between the Eastern and Red-sided subspecies of the Common Garter; descriptions are at the species level, and different subspecies are not always distinguished.

Common names definitely suffer from the focus on the species level, as “Eastern Racer” and “Eastern Ratsnake” are used, rather than the more commonly used subspecies names of “Blue Racer” and “Black Rat Snake”. Common names generally follow the names set out in SSAR’s Scientific and Standard English Names of Amphibians and Reptiles of North America North of Mexico (2000), rather than the more familiar and widely used names found in the controversial competing list put out by Joe Collins’s Centre for North American Herpetology.

In spite of the real space limitations, I would have liked to have seen descriptions of frog and toad calls and of amphibian eggs, which are dealt with only occasionally (larvae and tadpoles are well represented in the photographs), because in my experience eggs and calls are encountered often enough that having an answer in a field guide would have been a real help.

Those wanting to learn more about our native herpetofauna would do well to consult the excellent Amphibians and Reptiles of the Great Lakes Region by James H. Harding (1997). But, since that book is too large to tuck into your bag or pocket, grab this little book instead if you’re heading out into the field and need to know what it is you’ve just found.

On Victoria Day weekend, 23 crazy herpers from Ontario, Quebec and Michigan travelled to Pelee Island to stay at the Wilds of Pelee Island Outdoor Centre for Conservation, where they would help restore habitat and build hibernation and nesting sites for endangered reptiles and amphibians, and perhaps to catch a glance of the elusive Blue Racer (Coluber constrictor foxii). In spite of forecasts calling for rain throughout the weekend and rather cold temperatures, we did pretty well. While it was quite chilly, the weather obliged us by raining only at night (though this was a problem for some of us with less than optimal tents).

While the total number of reptiles spotted was somewhat lower than last year, that was mostly as a result of a change in our activities: we omitted a survey of the Centre property and a check of the tin and boards along a lane across from the Stone Road Alvar Nature Reserve — both of which produced copious numbers of Eastern Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis) and Brown Snakes (Storeria dekayi) last year. (By the way, about one-third of the garter snakes on Pelee Island are melanistic.) Because we weren’t consciously looking for these two species, we only came up with a handful of them. The garter snakes were usually none too happy to see us, especially the melanistics, which I’ve always found to be larger and more aggressive on the Island. And we missed finding adult Lake Erie Water Snakes (Nerodia sipedon insularum) — we found lots of them mating along the road last year, only a few hundred metres from the ferry dock — but found a number of juveniles, both last year’s young and those a year older, both of which still had their patterns.

But that was more than made up for the fact that we found more Eastern Fox Snakes (Elaphe gloydi) this year than last — including at least two juveniles born the previous year and some magnificent adults that had not yet been tagged. Fox Snakes are by far my favourite rat snake: not only are these snakes beautiful, with their black saddles on a straw-yellow background and red heads, but, at least on Pelee Island, Fox Snakes are almost universally tame. In my two visits to Pelee, I’ve seen approximately 20 captured Fox Snakes, and while some of them have musked upon capture, only one has ever tried to bite (and that was a juvenile in shed, caught during our 2001 trip). To have such a large snake to be as tame as a captive Corn Snake (Elaphe guttata guttata) from the point of capture is quite remarkable, even more so when you consider that other members of the genus Elaphe aren’t quite so laid back! It is therefore a real tragedy that the Eastern Fox Snake is in such trouble; while plentiful on Pelee Island, their range — basically, along the shores of Lakes Erie and Michigan, 80 per cent of which is in Ontario — is both limited and vulnerable.

And we did see a Racer! Well, some of us did. And even for many of us who saw one, it was “see” rather than “catch” (and I myself didn’t even see it). Not ten minutes before the Ottawa crowd had to leave the site (a tree farm) to catch the noon ferry on Monday, Stewart spotted one in tall grass, but in spite of the efforts of the entire herping party, who fanned out to try and do a systematic search, the snake eluded us. I was going to say that even that was better than the previous year, when we saw nothing at all, but then, on Tuesday morning, when most of our expeditionary force had gone home, the remaining group caught two Blue Racers and four more Eastern Fox Snakes. They had missed the 7:00 a.m. ferry (they thought it was at 8:00 a.m.) and were killing time back at the tree farm, and ended up scoring the find of the entire trip by happenstance! The rest of us, of course, hate them for it.

As far as other herps went, we also saw at least half a dozen Blanding’s Turtles (Emydoidea blandingi), a juvenile Midland Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta marginata) and a big Common Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina serpentina), all at Fish Point Nature Reserve, the southernmost tip of the island. We also found several salamanders in the Blue-spotted/Jefferson/Smallmouth Salamander complex (Ambystoma laterale, jeffersonianum and texanum, respectively — they often hybridize and it’s very difficult to tell apart hybrids from pure forms), at least one of which may have been a pure texanum (which are only found on the southern part of the island). Few anurans were spotted: Dave Smith caught a Bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) in a canal, and Dan Hoops thought he saw something hop in the trees along the berm from Hell near Lighthouse Point, the northeastern tip of the island, which, through process of elimination, could only have been a Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor), since Spring Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer) were extirpated long ago (wetlands drained; no habitat left). It certainly couldn’t have been a Blanchard’s Cricket Frog (Acris crepitans blanchardi), which many now consider to be extirpated from Canada as well (they were only found on Pelee Island in Canada), since they were only last seen at Fish Point, on the other side of the Island.

Those of us interested in birds were amply rewarded. Eddie Sanchez from Michigan got to add a few species to his life list, and Chantel Moore (from Aylmer, Quebec) reported seeing well over 40 different species!

All in all, the trip could not be considered anything except a success. Things ran more smoothly than they did during the first year (when we, starving on Sunday night, voted Jeff off the Island); Jeff and Jenny did a marvellous job this year organizing us and keeping us fed and happy. We also had more people this year than we did last year (23 vs. 15), and fewer tasks at the Centre, so our slave labour on behalf of the Centre — building hibernacula and nesting sites, clearing savanna habitat, pulling invasive plants — was kept to a minimum. And we also had the company of a group from the Federation of Ontario Naturalists, at least one of whom was not quite sure what to make of our President’s antics around the campfire (hi there, Steve).

Many of us brought digital cameras and took a huge number of pictures; others brought pocket cameras, and Stewart Stick and Terry Cox brought serious SLR camera gear. Brian Oehring from Ottawa brought a digital video camera. The results of all our shutterbuggery are now available online at a special Pelee Island field trip web site that I’ve set up; the address is www.ontarioherpers.org/pelee. As of this writing, the site has hundreds of digital images, a link to Beverly’s trip journal, and two short videos, which I edited from Brian’s excellent footage. One is nearly ten minutes long and details the capture, measurement, and tag-implantation of Eastern Fox Snakes; the other is a silly little 90-second thing showing Dave catching that Bullfrog. More material is being added all the time; I still have to hear from a few people who’ve been holding out on me, so be sure to check back at the site from time to time!

Two of the snakes we have cared for would have interesting stories to tell. They can’t talk, of course, so I’ll tell their stories for them. Both were snakes that came in from the wild under extraordinary circumstances. It’s amazing that either of them managed to survive. One we have kept, one we have released: when you read their stories, you’ll understand why.

The first snake was found in a head of lettuce in the produce section of a Toronto-area supermarket. He was very small, very frightened, and very pugnacious. He was immediately rescued by local hobbyists who were determined to prevent him from being used by the supermarket as evidence against the suppliers on whose trucks they supposed he arrived — they didn’t expect he would survive long as evidence. All parties presumed that he had arrived on a food shipment from the southern U.S., and on that basis, this small snake with bright burgundy blotches was identified as a Prairie Kingsnake (Lampropeltis calligaster calligaster).

Florence, hearing this story, decided that she wanted to adopt this snake, and the person looking after him was happy to oblige her. So, in early May 2000 I brought him back with me to Ottawa. He was small, still very shy, but not aggressive, and he seemed to be eating well.

But he didn’t look like a Prairie Kingsnake. I knew they were somewhat variable and supposed that he was from a locality with which I was unfamiliar. But, while I wasn’t in a position to second-guess the identification, I was nevertheless not confident about it. I asked some friends who had more expertise with native species, and they were all pretty sure, based in part on the picture accompanying this article, that he was, in fact, an Eastern Milk Snake (Lampropeltis triangulum triangulum), a species native to Ontario that is protected by provincial legislation. Just to be doubly sure, I counted the mid-body scale rows on a shed skin and consulted field guides. Prairie Kingsnakes have between 25 and 27 scale rows; Eastern Milk Snakes have between 19 and 23 rows. This snake has 19 scale rows. He’s an Eastern Milk Snake.

Eastern Milk Snakes have a reputation among Ontario reptile enthusiasts for being difficult captives that refuse to eat in captivity. Those who have caught wild milk snakes and brought them home have invariably watched them starve to death slowly. This fact alone should discourage anyone from taking one home to keep. (To say nothing of the fact that they’re protected by provincial law.) Leave them in the wild!

As for ours, we applied for and received a licence from the Ministry of Natural Resources. We didn’t know where he came from, and he had been in contact with a lot of domesticated reptiles, so releasing him into the wild was not a viable option. A difference of even a few kilometres could have meant introducing him into a distinct genetic population, thus messing up the natural gene pool. And while he could have come from near the supermarket itself, he could also have come, by truck, from anywhere in the Eastern Milk Snake’s natural range — essentially, anywhere in northeastern North America. So he stayed with us.

Almost as if on cue, once identified as a milk snake, he began to behave like one, and started refusing to eat. In one two-month period he ate only one pinky mouse. We began to worry. Mike Rankin suggested that we provide very dark and secure hiding places and leave him alone when offering food. We gave the milk snake an inverted flower pot with a small hole in the bottom in September 2000, and fed him in there. He began eating again, but every so often he has gone off his feed, with lengthy fasts in February and April of this year. He’s had a very good summer: we’ve been offering multiple pinkies and fuzzies, and he’s been growing very nicely. He’s even started to assume the more brownish colour associated with adult milk snakes. By now he’s doing so well that we refer to him as that rare creature, the milk snake that actually eats. But just to be clear about this: he’s the exception to the rule!

He’s still shy, and seems to be getting more nervous with the onset of fall, and may yet go off his feed again. We’ve grown to expect that, but we don’t worry that he’s going to starve any more.

Our second rescued snake, an adult female Eastern Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis), came to us in the dead of winter. She was turned in at the Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre over the Christmas holidays. If I remember the story correctly, she had been found in a snowbank and had to be more or less thawed out before being turned in. I really wish I had more information about what actually happened. Ken Storey of Carleton University has been studying the ability of reptiles and amphibians to withstand subzero temperature for short (or, in the case of amphibians, extended) periods, but in the case of garter snakes, he says they cannot withstand more than a few days. So my guess is that this snake had been flushed out of her hibernaculum somehow, and was lucky enough to have been discovered soon afterward.

We were to look after her over the winter — putting her back into hibernation was too risky, since we couldn’t tell if there was any frostbite damage — and release her in the spring. Releasing her was a viable option in this case, as it was not in the case of the Eastern Milk Snake, for two reasons. One, we were reasonably certain of her original locality (somewhere in the western suburbs of Ottawa), and a garter snake’s range is large enough that extreme precision isn’t critical. Two, while provincial law prohibits the release of Eastern Milk Snakes (and other specially protected wildlife) without government authorization, no such restrictions exist for garter snakes.

Our plan was to minimize contact with her and to avoid taming her down while we waited for spring. She was all too willing to oblige us: she was defensive, struck at us, and was generally intimidating — and has anyone noticed that the musk of wild garters is worse than that of captives? She wasn’t the best eater. She never once ate fish with us; we fed her worm-scented mice, with a nightcrawler chaser to whet her appetite (it’s hard to go wrong feeding worms to garters). She would have made a crummy pet. We had to remind ourselves that we wanted it this way: behaviour undesireable in a pet can be an asset in the rough and nasty wild.

We released her on the first weekend in May in the Stony Swamp Conservation Area. My notes record that it was a sunny, windy day, around 14°C. A couple of frogs were calling. She settled in under some leaf litter and quickly disappeared from casual view. If you’re hiking the Beaver Trail and come across a large, somewhat aggressive female garter snake with a badly stumped tail, say hello for us, would you?

When I first had the idea to write a short article about keeping ribbon snakes in captivity, my plan was to explain why ribbon snakes were a poor “beginner” snake in spite of their low price at pet stores. I would have based that argument on the herpetocultural literature on ribbon snakes and on our own experience with our single Western Ribbon Snake, which to date has made for a less than satisfactory captive. But things have gotten a bit more complicated since then, and now I’m left with more questions about ribbon snakes than answers. Which is probably a good thing.

There are two species of ribbon snake: the Eastern Ribbon Snake (Thamnophis sauritus), with four subspecies, one of which, the Northern Ribbon (T. s. septentrionalis), is native to our area; and the Western (Thamnophis proximus), with six subspecies, ranging from Wisconsin to Costa Rica. Biochemically they seem less closely related to other garter snakes than do some water snakes, and they are certainly each other’s closest relative: speciation has occurred quite recently, and they were only recognized as separate species in 1962 when they were discovered to occur in the same area without interbreeding.

Telling the difference between an Eastern and a Western Ribbon Snake is quite easy: Western Ribbon Snakes have two sometimes fused white spots on the top of their heads; Eastern Ribbon Snakes do not. Ribbon snakes can be differentiated from garter snakes by their overall shape: they’re very elongate; their side stripes are higher up on the body (on the third and fourth scale rows — most garters’ stripes are on the second and third rows); and there is no black between their labial (lip) scales.

While those of us who spend time in the field are likely to be quite well acquainted with the Eastern (Northern) Ribbon Snake, it’s the Western Ribbon Snake that is commonly found in pet stores. It, along with the Rough Green Snake (Opheodrys aestivus), is one of the few North American snakes still heavily collected for the pet trade. Ribbon snakes found in pet stores are almost certainly wild snakes; captive breeding, if it occurs, is only taking place on an incidental basis. Their low price — between $20 and $40 in local pet stores — may lead some to think that a ribbon snake might make a good starter pet.

Of course, as is the case with those $40 baby Green Iguanas (Iguana iguana), this is simply not the case: just because an animal is inexpensive does not mean that it is good for beginners. Fortunately, ribbon snakes are not extremely difficult to keep per se, but their diet and their behaviour make them hard to recommend for beginners.

Their diet is limited to anurans and fish in the wild, which means a diet of fish in captivity, since frogs and toads ought not to be used as feeder animals unless all else fails. A fish diet is manageable (provided you can handle the smell), but there are a few potential wrinkles: live fish can be difficult to obtain sometimes (and there are parasite risks); fish fillet isn’t nutritionally complete; and certain kinds of fish contain an enzyme that destroys Vitamin B1, leading to vitamin deficiencies that can kill the snake. A friend has managed to get both Northern and Western Ribbons to eat scented pinky mice; occasional mice certainly would help. An important note: unlike garter snakes, ribbon snakes will not normally eat earthworms.

As for their behaviour, ribbon snakes are active and inquisitive, and as a result can make very good display snakes. But they can be quite nervous, and apparently do not like to be handled — another significant drawback for beginning keepers.

All of the above seemed quite apparent with the Western Ribbon Snake we bought from a pet store last January. From the outset he has seemed a textbook case of everything I had read about ribbon snakes. He’s been nervous. He has bolted when we approached its cage; if he is active or curious, he’s doing it when we’re not around. He absolutely hates being handled: he has musked and bitten and has even gone into crocodile-style death rolls. And he has been a difficult feeder: he has only eaten live, whole fish. He has refused fish fillet and is too nervous to take food from tongs, which so far has ruled out trying pinky mice. All in all, something of a disappointment, since he’s a relatively small snake and I had hoped that a young ribbon would adapt better, somehow. Out of our entire collection, he’s probably the snake we enjoy the least.

So things stood when I first thought about writing this article. Then something happened that forced me to revise my thinking somewhat.

Sometime in July we received a phone call. A third party had caught a gravid female Northern Ribbon Snake, and the caller was looking for a home for her. After some discussion amongst ourselves we accepted her. For a gravid, wild-caught ribbon snake — three good reasons for a snake to be defensive right there — she was surprisingly placid. She even ate a few fish. Then, on August 4, she gave birth to nine perfect baby ribbon snakes.

(Compared with garter snakes, ribbon snakes have smaller litters of larger babies. These babies were easily as long as our Red-sided Garter Snake babies, which were then over two months old, and came from a litter of 26 live and one stillborn.)

Mother and babies forced me to reconsider what I had learned about ribbon snakes. All were reasonably calm. The mother permitted handling. Tempermentally, the babies were almost as good as the baby Red-sided Garters (and were much calmer than the baby corn snakes!). We gave the mother and six of the babies to friends who would put them to use in educational programs (you can see some of them at Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo) and kept three for ourselves.

The remaining three babies have proven to be wonderful captives. They do not fear our presence and do not automatically bolt when we’re near. They are quite handleable. And they’re calm enough to take food from our hands — not tweezers, not tongs, our hands. (They’ve also quickly learned to recognize the hands that feed them and have eagerly nibbled on fingertips in their enthusiasm.) Two have even accepted pieces of fish fillet. (Meanwhile, my friend reports that their mother is doing well and is even accepting scented mice!) These are ribbon snakes?

So what’s going on here? Why are these snakes so radically different from what is generally accepted to be the norm for ribbon snakes, and so different from our nervous Western Ribbon? I don’t know yet, but I have a few guesses.

One possibility is that the babies’ calm nature is because they were born in captivity. This seems to matter with other snakes that have a reputation for a nervous temperament and that are seldom bred. Yet the mother is equally calm, and has adapted to captivity extremely well after only a short time. Another possibility is that there may be a difference between the two species, although as far as I am aware there is no record of Eastern Ribbon Snakes being calmer than their western counterparts; one authority even believes that Western Ribbons are calmer than Easterns! A third possibility is that we’re merely dealing with individual quirks: that some ribbon snakes are very nervous, but some are calmer, and we just happened across a couple of extreme cases: one that is extremely nervous, and one of the calmer ones and her offspring. This is the most likely explanation; the other possibilities cannot be proven without a larger sample.

I’m very much grasping in the dark here and it may not be to any great purpose, but if nothing else my curiosity has been stoked. One project for the future that I’d like to try is to begin breeding Western Ribbon Snakes, partly to see if captive-bred offspring are any tamer or easier to keep than their wild-caught brethren, partly to try to counter, if only symbolically, the hordes of ribbon snakes caught for the pet trade.

Wandering Garter Snakes (Thamnophis elegans vagrans) will never win any ophidian beauty contests. They are essentially gray or grayish-brown snakes with a black checkered pattern and three cream-coloured stripes (occasionally the side stripes are not visible). To hobbyists enamoured of tricoloured milk snakes or mountain kingsnakes, they must seem quite drab, though their appearance might appeal to those of us who appreciate subtler, more subdued patterns (such as Baird’s Rat Snakes or Gopher Snakes). But whatever you think of their appearance, these are nevertheless very interesting snakes. They are reckoned as being one of the best (if not the best) garter snakes to keep in captivity, and they are probably the least garter-like garter snake north of Mexico.

Wandering Garter Snakes get their name from the belief that they tend to travel further from water than other garter snakes, but in fact studies have found them to be primarily a riparian habitat specialist. They are found at surprisingly high altitudes — they range from the Prairies to the West Coast, and cross the Rocky Mountains. The Wandering Garter is the widest-ranging of six subspecies of the Western Terrestrial Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans), and the only one found in Canada. It and the Coast Garter Snake (T. e. terrestris) are the only two that have any presence in the hobby — the red phase of the coast garter is spectacular and particularly coveted. But the coast garter is endemic to California, which prohibits the sale of all but a few native snakes, and as a result is a bit harder to find.

I have had a pair of Wandering Garters since May 2000, and I have been struck by the differences between these snakes and other garters. One difference you notice right away when handling them. Normally, garter snakes tend to have less muscle tone than snakes that constrict. In hand, garters do not grip (which means that you have to be more careful when handling them), and they don’t feel as strong as a corn snake or a pine snake. Wandering Garters, on the other hand, have much better muscle tone than other garters. Their musculature is not nearly as good as that of my Pine Snakes, but it’s surprisingly strong for a natricine. There are reports that they may employ some form of constriction (though it may well only be a matter of pinning the prey), but I haven’t seen that in my specimens.

Wandering Garters are well known for their diets. They have the broadest prey preferences of any natricine; in fact, they vie with Racers (Coluber constrictor) for having the widest prey preferences of any snake. In addition to the usual garter snake diet of fish, amphibians, and soft-bodied invertebrates, Wandering Garters will also eat any small vertebrate they can find, including mammals and reptiles. This has two implications for captivity. One, it’s extremely easy to get these snakes to eat mice. Mine leap from their hideboxes to grab fuzzy or hopper mice that are dropped into their cages; their feeding response is better than that of our rat snakes, and matches the recorded response of captive Coachwhips (Masticophis flagellum), i.e., nearly instantaneous. And two, Wandering Garters eat other snakes. Captive Wandering Garters have eaten their cagemates, so they must be housed individually.

They also appear to have the most toxic saliva of any garter snake. Garters are not rear-fanged, but they do have a Duvernoy’s gland and some do have enlarged rear teeth. Some people have reported redness and swelling after being bitten by Common Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis), and one herpetologist has even developed an allergic reaction to garter bites. This sounds a bit like the case with bites from Hognose Snakes (Heterodon). If Wandering Garters are worse than Common Garters, I can’t offer any insights from my own experience, because mine have never bitten me. They can be quick and energetic in hand, but they’ve always been tame. In fact, I can’t remember either of them even musking (though the male is more nervous, as is often the case with garter snakes, and has struck through the cage). The fact that both are captive bred may have something to do with that.

I will try to breed my pair of Wandering Garters next year. Stay tuned.

On the morning of April 13, 2001, six OARA members departed Ottawa for an undisclosed location in southwestern Ontario. They were Andrew Mott, Brian Oehring, Jeremy Pallas, Marc St. Pierre, Florence Lehmann and myself, crammed with our gear into a rented minivan for a long road trip. Once there, we would join Steve Marks, Mike Elioff, Dave Smith, Stewart Stick and Drew and Killian Hamilton to search for the Spotted Turtle (Clemmys guttata). We were participants in a scientific study (under permit) to see whether this species was found at the site in question. While a substantial number of turtles had been present a quarter century ago, more recent surveys had found few, if any. Last year, the first year of our survey, only two turtles had been found: an old female last spring and a male in June. We didn’t know if a viable breeding colony was present — the male was found a kilometre from the female’s site — but we were nonetheless hopeful.

Steve, who was organizing this survey, now in its second year, has been very careful not to mention publicly where this location is, and has been screening the people who were able to attend. And for good reason. Spotted Turtles, like other members of the genus Clemmys, are cute and interesting turtles with personality, and would make great pets if their conservation status wasn’t a problem. They are listed as a species of special concern by COSEWIC and are protected by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. They are also protected over most of their range. Even so, with the wholesale price in the United States for a Spotted Turtle being around $150, poaching is a concern. It’s happened in Ontario. And Steve, knowing that this was a very sensitive population, is taking no chances.

As for the weekend in question, we weren’t sure whether the weather would cooperate. Certainly the forecast wasn’t promising: cloudy skies and lots of rain throughout the weekend, high winds on Friday, and even snow on Saturday morning. If that forecast was borne out, I feared that we might not see any reptiles at all that weekend. “Oh well,” I thought to myself. “At least we might get a chance to monitor some amphibians.” I was not optimistic; my only hope was that given such crummy conditions, even a brief patch of sun would bring everything out to bask. So I was hoping for just a bit of sun. But, as it turned out, the weather was more than good to us. The weekend was cold, with overnight temperatures near freezing, and there was often high cloud cover. But it didn’t rain at all, and the afternoons were sunny enough, and warm enough, that the reptiles became active. We saw a lot of them; I myself saw or heard nine species of reptile or amphibian on Saturday, and I didn’t see them all!

The trip to the site was long, and delayed somewhat by a short and pleasant side trip we took just after lunch. As we neared Peterborough, we noticed that the Indian River Reptile Zoo was open. Suddenly our keenness to arrive at the survey site on time evaporated, and we spent ninety minutes mucking around the zoo. I personally hadn’t been there since the previous June, and had lots of fun taking pictures of some of my favourite rattlesnakes. The zoo also had a display of Spotted Turtles, which was useful for those of us who had never seen one before.

By 7:00 pm we had arrived at the site, and Steve, who was beginning to wonder where the hell we were, told us what they had seen that afternoon: several Northern Ribbon Snakes (Thamnophis sauritus septentrionalis) and a whole bunch of Eastern Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis), some of which were mating (Stewart caught some of that on video). They also saw, but could not catch, a Spotted Turtle; they suspected that it was the same female they caught the year before.

We had enough time to set up our campsite, which was made easier by the presence of yurts — heated, permanent tents with bunk beds — which obviated the need for our tents and sleeping pads. (Too bad we hadn’t known for sure in advance, because the minivan was very crowded, and we could well have afforded to leave some equipment behind.) We fired up our stoves and swapped stories back and forth, talking late into the night. If you took a few steps away from our campfire conversations, you could hear distant choruses of an awful lot of Spring Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer).

It was a slow start the next morning. We donned our waders (those of us who had them) and split into two groups: Andrew, Florence and I joined Dave, and later Stewart and Mike, to survey one set of ponds and bogs, while the rest went off with Steve, the Hamiltons, Nora Toth from the MNR and her family. Even though we began at Fen Number One, where the Spotted Turtle and lots of garters were seen the day before, we couldn’t find anything — it was just too cold in the morning. For the first couple of hours all our group had to show for our efforts was a few decomposed Northern Leopard Frogs (Rana pipiens) found floating in the temporary pools. Winter kill, no doubt. A bit more interesting was the skeleton of a Common Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina) that Dave found at the bottom of a deeper pond: nothing left but algae-covered bones, and the turtle was of a size that it could only have died during winter; no predator could have taken out a turtle that big. But then, at around 11:40 am, Florence found a female snapping turtle, with a carapace about 22 cm long. Because of the cold — the air temperature was around 5-6°C at that point, and the water was colder than that — she didn’t put up much of a fuss.

At midday we stopped for a quick nibble. It was beginning to warm up and the sun’s position had risen to the point where basking turtles could make use of it, and we began to spot basking Midland Painted Turtles (Chrysemys picta marginata) at several ponds. While I wasted time trying to photograph some egg masses and other indeterminate fuzzy clouds in the water, Dave and Florence slowly approached a basking Painted Turtle that Mike had spotted; it was still cold enough that Dave was able to catch it and bring it back to the boardwalk for us to have a look and take some pictures.

It continued to get warmer and we began seeing more and more animals. At our next site, a largeish bog, Dave turned a log on a dry patch to find a Northern Ribbon Snake underneath. It was a male, about 40 cm long, and brownish in colour. Because of the iron in the soil, many of the herps in the area — including the Spotted Turtles — had a lot of red in their skin, but this snake wasn’t nearly as red as some of the ribbons the others had reported seeing. In any event, it was the first sauritus I had seen (ribbon snakes in the pet trade are invariably Western Ribbon Snakes, Thamnophis proximus). Usually ribbon snakes are quite difficult to handle; I have one at home that actually spins in your hands when you try to handle it, in a manner reminiscent of a crocodile’s death roll. When it does that, I worry that it will snap in half. This one, though, was, like the snapper, too cold to protest at being handled.

Shortly thereafter Dave began catching Leopard Frogs. There were a lot of them, and none that he caught were very big — maybe 4-5 cm SVL. We were starting to be envious of Dave’s ability to find herps. He was awfully good at it. Steve explained it later: Mucking around ponds in chest waders is clumsy work that creates a lot of noise and wake. The turtles hear us coming a mile away and get clear of us. But Dave — he moved slowly and was very patient. And he got results. He caught two more painted turtles before Steve started hollering for us to come back to the campsite for a late (around 3:00 PM) lunch.

At lunch we compared notes with the other troop. They had much less luck with turtles than we did, but they reported seeing red efts (the terrestrial phase of the Eastern Newt, Notophthalmus viridiscens), a Red-backed Salamander (Plethodon cinereus) and a Spotted Salamander (Ambystoma maculatum). Jeremy later reported seeing a large tadpole that could only have been a Bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) in its second year as a tadpole.

They also captured an adult male Eastern Garter Snake for Nora, who was conducting interviews the following day and wanted to test job applicants’ ability to give a demonstration with a snake. We played around with him a bit during lunch. By this point the day was growing quite warm, and more snakes started emerging. A female garter snake was found near the campsite, and musked us through the copulatory plug that a randy male had left in her vent recently. We also examined a juvenile garter, born the previous summer; we were glad to see it had survived hibernation. Other than musking, none of them were aggressive, although the male apparently bit Steve upon capture.

The afternoon shift was shorter and yielded fewer but more interesting results. We redivided our teams: Jeremy, Brian and Marc joined Dave, Florence and me and we went back to Cranberry Bog to have another look. We started at the last pool we surveyed before lunch and worked our way back. By this point (around 5:00 p.m.) individual Spring Peepers began to call, at least one of which was close by, which was pretty neat. But it was beginning to cool a bit. There was less sun and it drizzled briefly, and the pond wasn’t offering much. As bleating Canada geese (Branta canadensis) dropped in on the pond, master herp-finder Dave found more winter kill: another decomposing Leopard Frog and a very large and still mostly intact snapping turtle (its eyes were missing); the water had likely only recently thawed and was still quite cold.

We then tried out a nearby open cove to see if anything was there in the pools by the lake. Unfortunately the pools were populated by several very large and aggressive carp (Cyprinus carpio), which would have long since annihilated any resident amphibians. We were hopeful for snakes, but didn’t see any. But as we left, we found a Red-backed Salamander under a board — the first I had seen.

Moving back to the original bog, Dave quickly found the Ribbon Snake we had found that morning under the same log. Nearby, he also found a male Brown Snake (Storeria dekayi). For the Ottawa herpers this was something of a treat, since Brown Snakes have not (yet) been found in eastern Ontario; it was the first one they had seen. Brown Snakes are natricines, and they are closely related to Red-bellied Snakes (Storeria occipitomaculata). They’re about as small as Red-bellied Snakes, too: this one was around 20 cm long, and probably an adult. Brown Snakes feed on slugs and earthworms (whereas Red-bellied Snakes eat just slugs), and while they may musk you when handled, they are generally quite gentle.

At that point we had pretty much herped out our location, and we decided to head back to the camp, where the other team had a surprise waiting for us. They had caught a Spotted Turtle! It was the same female they had seen on Friday, and the same one they had caught the year before. They had found her back at Fen Number One, where we started that morning. She was spectacular, very red throughout, and had some interesting old scars along her carapace. As Steve held her and took her measurements, we circled around her with our cameras, snapping pictures like mad. Those of us using film went through an entire roll! She was, after all, a very pretty turtle.

Once the day’s herping was done, Steve and Mike began to consider what might be a more effective strategy. Since Spotted Turtles are cold-adapted animals that are hard to find during the summer, we have to search early in the season to find them active. But because it’s so cold, there is only a small window of opportunity in which to find them. So tramping around a wide area in waders was probably not the most effective way of searching for Spotted Turtles — though, as it turned out, it was a great way to see a lot of different animals! Next time, they thought, they should consider staking out individual ponds and waiting for any turtles to come out, or drift-netting: a more passive approach that might yield more results, and shed better light on the population status of this sensitive population.

We fed ourselves in-town that night, and talked around the campfire into the early hours of the morning. Sunday morning most of us were too tired to get moving promptly; this was as much a result of the long day Saturday as the late night. And it was cold, and more overcast than it had been the day before. Any active herps would only come out in the mid to late afternoon, we surmised, so we packed up our things, chatted some more, posed for a group photo, and got on our way shortly after noon. All who went agreed that though it was a long way to have gone, it was a trip well worth taking. Several want to do it again next year, and the enthusiasm for the next big expedition outside eastern Ontario — Pelee Island on Victoria Day weekend — is already high.

Nowhere in the recent herpetological or herpetocultural literature regarding Butler’s Garter Snakes, Thamnophis butleri, are rodents referred to as a potential food source, either in captivity or in the wild.¹ Field studies have confirmed that earthworms make up the overwhelming proportion of a Butler’s Garter Snake’s diet, followed by leeches; laboratory studies have shown that they also react to toads, small frogs, red-backed salamanders and small fish (Catling and Freedman 1980, Rossman, Ford and Seigel 1996).

Although Butler’s Garters are clearly earthworm specialists in the wild, many herpetocultural authorities, perhaps relying on dated sources that refer briefly to several prey items (e.g. Ditmars 1939, Logier 1958 and Wright and Wright 1957), seem unclear about their diet. Perlowin (1992) makes no specific comments about the species’s diet, referring only in passing to chopped earthworms and feeder guppies for neonates. Sweeney (1992) is uncertain, saying that the diet “is thought to include earthworms, leeches, small frogs and salamanders” in the wild. Rossi (1992), on the other hand, states that “earthworms are definitely the preferred food” but allows for small fish and amphibians as well. None of these authorities mention rodents. Yet we have managed to maintain six specimens of Butler’s Garters on a diet that either includes, or is mostly or even entirely based upon, domestic mice.

Jeff imported two adult T. butleri and four captive-born neonates in the summer of 2000. (Two of those neonates were later given to Jonathan.) Since earthworms are low in calcium (but see Rossi and Rossi 1995), and not always readily available in the winter, Jeff wanted to switch his Butler’s Garters to mice, as is frequently done with common garter snakes, Thamnophis sirtalis. He started the two adults with worm-scented pinky mice, and the four neonates with worm-scented pinky mouse legs and tails. All six T. butleri ate readily. After several feedings, he began trying unscented mice or mouse parts. One of the adults readily ate unscented pinky mice; the other would only take mice if they were scented with earthworm. In general, the neonates would take unscented pinky legs and tails, although some of them were better feeders than others.

When he got them, Jonathan gave his two neonates a more varied diet. Pinky parts were offered at only one quarter of the feedings, chopped nightcrawler, Lumbricus terrestris, was offered at roughly one half of the feedings, and fish fillet (ocean perch from the supermarket) was offered at the remaining one quarter of the feedings. Supplemental calcium and vitamins B1 and D3 were added occasionally. The varied diet allowed for a rough comparison of feeding responses. Not surprisingly, chopped nightcrawler elicited the strongest feeding response, followed by pinky parts, then fish fillet. It was somewhat surprising that mice seem to have been preferred over fish; more on that momentarily. In general, feeding response for these little gluttons was strong no matter what was offered, in sharp contrast to Sweeney’s (1992) comments that “in captivity the snake can prove to be a choosy feeder, often accepting only earthworms to begin with and sometimes even refusing those.”

With the onset of winter, Jeff’s four remaining T. butleri began to refuse food more frequently. Jonathan’s neonates, on the other hand, showed no sign of refusing food, even though the room in which they are kept has reached air temperatures as low as 15°C and supplemental lighting is not provided. One possible explanation is the difference in the two colonies’ diets: at that point Jeff’s T. butleri were fed pinky parts almost exclusively, whereas Jonathan’s pair were fed the varied diet enumerated above. A varied diet may ensure a good feeding response to all food items offered. Jeff’s adult T. butleri have been brumated and his two neonates have been placed with Jonathan temporarily. The neonates have been offered the varied diet and feed well.

If Butler’s Garters have such a restricted diet in the wild, why are they relatively easy to convert to a mouse-based diet? And why are their prey preferences so much broader than their actual diet in the wild? Habitat preferences are believed to limit T. butleri’s available prey in the wild (Rossman, Ford and Seigel 1996), but for our purposes that begs the question. Their evolutionary relationships with othe