During our first trip to the Long Point region of southernmost Ontario with the school herd, we received a guided tour of the inside of John Backhouse’s mill. The first artifact I spotted, right there in the anteroom, was an old taxidermy mount of a very large Eastern foxsnake, twining up about a piece of driftwood. I remember being in awe of the size of this reptile, given that it was a native type. Who knows how large it would seem today, but it was certainly larger than any snake I had found to that date. I asked the young guide (now probably a withered crone) if they were still around, as this was obviously a specimen of considerable vintage, and she said that they very much were. That in fact, the place was stiff with ’em.
This trip took place in mid-October and the only snake i came across was a hatchling Eastern hognose snake, exciting in itself, and looking much like a young Massassauga - a species wiped from that region decades previous. I did not return to the place until I was sixteen, driving a borrowed car. It was a fine early June Saturday, sunny, warm and clear. I was accompanied by a good friend, whom we’ll call here for purposes of privacy simply The Voice of the Mantis. With this new recourse to wheels, we took to the tobacco country. Which if i depict it as a romantic region-apart, that’s because it is. It is not dramatic, but it somehow has an aura to it unmatched anywhere else i have spent time, this Norfolk Sand Plain country. Modest farm houses and rows of old tobacco kilns covered in green tarpaper and with red shutters that could be closed to control the climate within. Billboards advertising peanut plantations. Almost as soon as we passed into this welcoming land, we began seeing our first reptiles. Hard at the side of Highway 24, up on a small sandbank, Blanding’s turtles for instance, nesting. Other turtles. stone coated metal sheets roofing
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Our plan was to proceed down the fifty-nine highway to the Point proper, snake hunt where it seemed right, and then head on up to the Backus Woods and the environs of John Backhouse’s mill to see if the guide those years previous had been honest with me in her depiction. I just couldn’t get the image of that great stuffed foxsnake from the mill out of my head. It was more compelling to me than the appearance of the world’s largest squirrel on a morning of sharpest hunger for squirrelmeat, maybe. I was looking forward to hunting the rolling, ravine-cut woodland and meadow mosaic landscape of the Backus Woods and environs as much or more than the exotic marshes and dunelands of the Point. Perhaps this was because the landscape inland was more like that of home, or what i imagined home might have been like in my Grandad’s early years. Hunting it would be not at all unlike hunting the quieter corners of my squirrel and coon hunting grounds, with the difference that the snake fauna was still significantly intact, the reptiles not yet having met their version of the Seneca Cliff as had the herpetofauna of Lincoln County during the 1970’s. But we stuck to their plan and forged first to the Point.
A few miles before you got there, the lands flattened out entirely to give the impression of a sort of delta landscape. Dark rich rural blooddirt underlain by clay here rather than sand, and no tobacco being grown on this belt. Houses passed were modest and thankfully few and mostly it was billiard-table-level fields, quite expansive near the lake as opposed to just a couple of miles futher inland where the fields were small and surrounded by towering Carolinian woods. Then the highway dipped a little and we were on the causeway across the great marsh. Two nimrods on high-alert. We passed over the causeway – legendary scene of reptile carnage at the tires of the automobile – without seeing much more than a few painted turtles and one big snapping turtle.
We parked at a lot and began our search of the point, soon venturing onto prohibited federal conservation lands. These being the nearest thing we have in a ‘classless’ society to a Royal Woods. Set aside for its own sake and for study by papered elites such as biologists and ecologists whose academic accomplishments and elevated motives rank them worthy of exclusive places and experiences. The naturalist’s version of membership in an exclusive club on a gated estate. A smart move in the balance, denying access to the general hordes, ever ballooning and seemingly unable on average to refrain from destroying that in nature which they claim to be seeking, most usually by their sheer self-serving numbers, but also on account of the machines they mindlessly insist on jockeying everywhere. Not that biologists aren’t also into self-service and being prone at times to do damage, just that there are far less of them, typically. Although this is changing as well, at Long Point and environs. Where in my youth you might run into one or two scrawny tobacco farmers and there were big snakes everywhere, it seems today with snakes grown scarce you are as likely to run into biologists in pursuit of credentials on the backs of some study subject as you are to run into anyone else. Perhaps more so. Sometimes perhaps for the better of things other-than-human, but not necessarily so. It should not be lost on us that with the general burgeoning of this professional class there has been no commensurate general flourishing of nature over the same frame of time - quite the opposite in fact. To the life forms they are chasing for the knowledge they may impart, they are doubtless just one more additive nuisance, as I was during the events of this tale, and at many additional junctures to boot, including when i myself was doing sanctioned studies. With some notable if not necessarily significant damage having been done at Norfolk. Is this damage being compensated for through the outcomes of our studies, is nature turning up in the black ink? Indeed, selfishly or not I liked it better when there were far more snakes on the land and far less academics and people in general chasing them along with everything else we seem to feel any semi-intact natural environment owes us in advancements and amusements, professional and otherwise, but more on that in a future segment. These people are only seeking, in the end, what I was seeking and still am, after-all. There’s just a helluva lot more of us, now, than there was then.
At any rate, back to “then.” Where there are gated natural estates there are poachers, even if it is just the experience of being there for-the-moment that they are poaching. And that’s what we were, down there on the point, for the hour or two that we were out-of-bounds. Poachers of the moment. We contented ourselves with numbers of black gartersnakes, our first such, with the abundance of these reptiles buoying us on, hoping the locale would offer up a foxsnake or a hognose snake. We kept to the lee-side of the dunes, where there was more concealment for our underclass. We ventured down the point until we came to a place where the lake had breached-through, a narrow but deep channel resulting. This is a normal process on Long Point. Cuts appear and are healed over, a landscape carved in sand being plastic as compared to a landscape carved in heavier soils or in stone. We hadn’t long turned back when we heard a vehicle approaching down the beach, a strange choice of conveyance for people concerned with the delicacy of a landscape, but there you go. Handy at any rate - no one is going to sneak up on someone of awareness with a motor vehicle in a natural environment. The Voice and I hid like leverets in a form, in behind the dunes where a giant cottonwood lay prone, The vehicle, which we could not see, stopped adjacent us on the other side of a dune. We could hear the intrusive chattering of our own species giving-tongue on a two-way radio, without being able to hear the details. Whether this meant we were being hunted or whether just coincidence, we did not know. We interpreted it as the latter to err on the side of caution. It was not long at any rate before the vehicle turned around and made its way back towards the public reaches of the point. We rose cautiously and following some recon continued back ourselves. Leisurely hunting as we went. We found Spotted turtles and more gartersnakes, but not our intended quarry, and for some reason the habitat there, unusual as it was, was beginning to bore us. A hunt - for anything - being not just about the quarry, but also about the setting. It was time to head to the Backus Woods.
The Backus Conservation Area of that time had yet to be a manicured to the extent that you will find it today, with lengths having been taken since to make it more inviting to a people more at home on sidewalks and lawns than in nature. In its more natural state it offered the perfect set of conditions to conserve both human and reptile heritage. Anyone who has been on a working farmscape as this once was can report that such a place can be rather cluttered, especially at its margins, with all the leavings and after-effects of the previous genrations, decades and centuries, depending on the age of the farm, in fallow plots and hedgerows grown-in rank. Artifacts from the golden age of the horse are often in evidence, as are older tractors, unused cars of every vintage from the Model T on up, as well as scrap lumber, entire sides of old buildings lying in the grass, still-standing outbuildings no longer in use, and scattered sheets of roofing metal and plywood. All this rubbish, most of it coming from the era before plastic, and unlike this latter substance which lends a cheap trashiness to a place even when the plastic is new and the place still in use, becomes rather part of the charm of the place, the romance, the aesthetic. It is impossible to mow around such clutter, so natural cover takes over. It is something conservation authorities rarely seem to understand however, insisting on cleaning such scenes up and manicuring the lawns, stripping the character and rendering the place sterile and unlike anything it likely ever was in working life, before the mandate focused on catering to the dull edge of the human blade. Aside from the negative effect this has on rural authenticity, it also has an effect on wildlife. On snakes, and on snake hunters. Snakes love these littered old farmyards, as they offer great opportunities for a cold blooded creature to hunt, to hide, and to regulate its body temperature at the same time as remaining out of sight. A snake that must resort to a natural feature such as a woodchuck burrow or rock crevice for shelter must necessarily reveal itself to get warm, to thermoregulate as they say, but it may not be in evidence for long, and when it is in its recesses for lengthy spans of snaketime, it is inaccessible, unknowable to the snake hunter. A snake that is lucky enough to have one of these old farmyards as part of its territory conversely, can crawl under a thin old board, remain hidden, and yet the heat still radiates through and warms it. Not only that, but very often it can find a meal of rodents under there as well. Even better for this purpose on cooler yet sunny days is old roofing metal, and other types of thin metal cladding, when it falls into disuse and lies about on the ground. Here is a material that warms up very quickly in the sun. On warm sunny days, it becomes too hot in a hurry, and by then the warmed-up reptile either begins foraging or perhaps retreats into a rodent burrow which may itself be a feature of the landscape under the tin. If the day is just a little cooler than ideal temperature for the reptile, it may return underneath the tin again and again during the day, and certainly it will benefit from returning – hopefully with a full stomach – as dusk comes down. And here, unlike in the burrow or fissure, the snake is readily known to the snake hunter.
We went now to the old Backhouse Junior homestead. We spied the sheets of rusty tin in the long grass out behind Junior’s beautiful old home as the day was coming onto one-thirty or two-o’clock. Almost as soon as we spied it we understood the error we had committed in our hunting strategy for the area. We realized we should have been focusing our time looking for more of this sort of old structure around these heritage buildings – perhaps the barn that we had passed near the south entrance to the conservation area, other such relics of a former time. Instead, young and ignorant, we had wandered about over the land hoping to randomly come upon our quarry. But here now was a scene we knew might be relied upon to have drawn our game. The day was warm, but not so warm that it was inconceivable that a snake might not be coming and going from underneath a metal artifact. We honed in.
Luck was on our side. As we leaned down to turn the first sheet of corrugated metal, there right under my gaze and close-up was the unmistakable spotted rear third of a foxsnake that was just then taking shelter beneath the cover. It was immediately clear before even turning the artifact that this was the largest snake either of we youths had found to date. The Voice of the Mantis was heard, sounding in approbation. And when we did turn the metal, it was equally clear that here we had one of the most beautiful snakes they had ever found, indeed, one of the more compelling sights in all of the wild. Closer to five than to four feet - average for this snake - hefty and with the beautiful rich brown blotches on subtle straw grading to a burnt orange that is typical of specimens this reptile, and of course with the exquisite, copper-coloured newpenny head, we had our quarry in-hand. Our first foxsnake hunt was a resounding success.
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