Snakes on a plain Confronting her fear, reporter gets up close and personal with thousands of garter snakes By: AV Kitching Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, May. 17, 2023 Last Modified: 9:55 AM CDT Thursday, May. 18, 2023 Updates

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This article was published 17/05/2023 (845 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The red-sided garter snake is not poisonous. The red-sided garter snake is not poisonous. The red-sided garter snake is not poisonous. Repeat ad infinitum.

My stomach is in knots. I feel nauseated. In an attempt to quell my fears, I read extensively about the snakes the night before my visit to the world-famous Narcisse Snake Dens, but it proves counterproductive. I dream of snakes sliding into my mouth like slippery noodles, swarming down my throat, suffocating me.

When I was young, I lived with my maternal grandmother in a rural town in the north of Malaysia. Beside my grandmother’s house was an empty plot of land where a fold of cattle would gather, herded by a lady holding a long staff topped with a jangly bell.

One afternoon she turned up at the chain-link fence, sticking her bare foot through the gaps.

“A snake bit me,” she explained in Tamil, while I watched in fascination as blood trickled out of her toe.

“Lucky it wasn’t a venomous snake,” my grandmother said.

In Malaysia, almost all snakes are dangerous.

If they’re not trying to kill you with their venom, they’re squeezing you with deadly hugs. There are at least 191 species there, the biggest of which is the reticulated python, which can grow up to 9.6 metres long, weighing more than 550 pounds.

These squamates curl up in houses built too close to 130-million-year-old rainforests. Displaced by indiscriminate land-clearing, they seek shelter in the warm spaces between roof and ceiling. Twined in pairs, they often remain unnoticed until cracks start forming in plaster, shedding flakes on the floor, alerting homeowners that something is amiss.

My childhood was filled with tales of cobras and pythons, copperheads and vipers hiding in the tall grasses, slinking between flip-flop-clad feet in unmowed gardens and rural playgrounds, seeking shelter from monsoon rains in toilet u-bends.

In Manitoba, however, these coiled creatures are admired, not feared. And none more so than the red-sided garter snake, whose yearly mating habits draw crowds in droves to Narcisse, a bumpy 90-minute drive north of Winnipeg.

The dens are home to the largest concentration of snakes in the world and for between three to four short weeks a year — end of April to the end of May — as the weather warms up, swarms of snakes wriggle out of their underground caverns to heed the primal breeding call.

Throngs twist and twine into large mating balls, hundreds of male snakes surrounding the lone female, all eager to pass on their genes. Only a few manage to cling to the stronger female as she attempts to slither off.

The snakes are not at all dangerous, I am repeatedly assured. Visitors can gently pick them up, should they desire, but are warned they might get a nip if the snakes are afraid.

There are some lines I will not cross; this is one.

The snakes like sunny days and are most active between mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Today, however, in the overcast, sticky weather, the reptiles are sluggish.

The park’s three-kilometre trail winds across the Prairie, passing by four snake dens. The first is quiet — nary a slither in mossy, stony ground as I peer from the viewing platform, carefully checking there are no creatures near me.

Den 2 has more activity. About 10 people are clustered around the railings of the viewing platform, a good indicator snakes are about.

Charlie Winkworth, five, picks one up. “It’s wriggly,” he says, holding it gently as he smiles.

Friends Wynne Haaksma and Cara Lizotte from Winnipeg have made the trip to see the snakes. It’s Haaksma’s first time, Lizotte’s third and they’re both confident at handling the creatures. Lizotte invites me to touch one.

I would rather not, but if a five-year-old can do it then maybe I can.

Reader, I crossed the line.

The snake is tiny. I gently place a finger upon it. It immediately rears its small head, causing me to stifle a yell and back away, horrified. Never again.

As the day warms up, the ground below us starts to writhe as more of the reptiles come up from the cold limestone caves. On the viewing platform, people jostle for a better look; voices are raised, teenagers crack jokes. Older folks lean across the railing, phones aloft as they narrate snake action to an invisible audience. There are people crawling on their hands and knees, trying to touch the snakes on the path as they wriggle away.

I don’t like snakes, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling sorry for them.

The smell of cigarette smoke lingers in the air; while there are bins everywhere, there is still litter on the ground, which staff will pick up at the end of the day, once visitors start thinning out.

Brandon Stuebing and Gary Chikousky are snake interpreters. They say people mostly keep to the rules — while it’s fine to touch the snakes, at no point can you enter the dens — but sometimes visitors overstep.

“People have attempted to climb in,” Chikousky says.

“The fences are there to keep them out, not keep the snakes in. The management is talking about putting signs up here to make people aware that they can’t go into the dens. The vast majority are good, but there’s a few in every bunch.”

There are a couple more weeks left to mating season. Come June, they head to the wetlands and marshes, where food is plentiful. There they will stay and feed for the summer months, putting on fat for winter before heading back to the dens in early autumn, when the weather starts to cool down.

The area fills up with visitors once more as people crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the snakes before they head back underground.

I won’t be one of them.

av.kitching@winnipegfreepress.com