Following the successful ten-year run of the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas, Ontario Nature developed a Long-Term Monitoring Protocol (LTMP) to fill important knowledge gaps about Ontario’s common and at-risk snakes. Since 2019, we’ve expanded the LTMP from nine monitoring locations to over 60 sites across the province! We recently published a Story Map where you can learn all about this project and how to get involved.

The Long-Term Monitoring Protocol (LTMP)

Ontario Nature’s Long-Term Monitoring Protocol (LTMP) for snakes was launched in 2019. It uses standardized survey methods across a large geographic area to help improve our understanding of snake populations, detect changes over time, and guide conservation efforts. The LTMP brings together First Nations, scientists, landowners and volunteers to monitor snakes across the province, using plywood boards placed within snake habitat.

What’s in the Story Map?

The LTMP Story Map is a platform with text, maps, figures, and photos that showcases this project. It includes:

• Background information about why we’re monitoring snakes
• An overview of the methods used
• Interactive maps showing our partners and how the project has grown over time
• Early results from the first five years of data collection
• Information about the events we run
• How to get involved
• Lots of photos!

Help us monitor snakes!

You can participate in snake surveys as a volunteer or set up a new snake monitoring site! Many of the existing sites are monitored by volunteers and may be looking for more people to help with surveys. If you have access to land with suitable snake habitat, you could set up your own site with plywood boards, survey for snakes, and contribute data to our province-wide database.

Learn more

Check out the LTMP Story Map to find out more about the project and how to join! You can learn more about snakes and other reptiles and amphibians of Ontario in the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas. Test your knowledge with our identification quizzes!

The Story Map development was generously supported by the Hodgson Family Foundation.

Man, 57, was watching snake-charming show when reptile crawled into his trousers, say German police

A German tourist has died after a snake crawled into his trousers and bit him as he watched a show in Egypt on a family holiday, police in Germany have said.

The 57-year-old man was watching the snake-charming show at a hotel in Hurghada, a popular beach holiday destination on the Red Sea, in early April.

At a friend’s cottage I recently uncovered a copy of The Reptiles of Ontario published in 1939 by the Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology. It’s an artifact that thrills with the mention of the extraordinary nature once found near human settlement.

It says that, in 1877, a timber rattlesnake, a species now extirpated from Ontario, was discovered a mile from Niagara Falls and even into the late 1930s this large snake—which can be five feet or longer—was found at Niagara Glen.

The spiny soft-shelled turtle, now endangered, once occurred in Hamilton Bay. The spotted turtle, also endangered, was in the 1930s common around Lake Erie. The eastern hog-nosed snake, currently threatened, was in 1907 found in Toronto.

The book’s most uplifting section is devoted to the Massasauga rattlesnake. The author, E.B.S. Logier, offers it a measure of empathy. In fact, he hints that it has intrinsic value.

This is extraordinary given that it’s long been reviled in the province. From the time of early settlement on, many considered it dangerous. Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, wrote in her diary in the 1790s that 700 rattlesnakes were killed during the building of a mill on the Humber River.

Logier laments that the creature is rarely seen and adds, “There will be multitudes of serious-minded people in the generations yet to come who will wish to see and study rattlesnakes…so there is a responsibility incumbent on us who are living today, and who by the very nature of the case are trustees of an estate to be passed on, not to wantonly destroy any living thing, regardless of whether from our point of view it is a desirable creature or not.”

Logier says we should protect rattlers because it would benefit humans: future Ontarians may want to experience them. But by urging their preservation even if they aren’t desirable ‘from our point of view’ he also suggests wildlife has inherent worth. It’s his use of ‘our point of view’ — coming decades before the modern environmental movement — that’s impressive here.

Further, in calling us “trustees of an estate”, he implies our job is not to exploit the natural world but to safeguard it. This echoes the message and conservation work of Ontario Nature, which reminds us that the environment is entrusted to us for future generations, not as something to own, but as something to steward.

Logier isn’t ready to grant the Massasauga constitutional rights (what might be called “security of the serpent”), but he’s gesturing in that direction.

And given he was writing 87 years ago, that’s admirable.