"Opinionatedly Yours"
#3: August 18, 1997
Claiming One Small Victory
By Barry Kent MacKay

Most animal rights and animal welfare literature and commentary focuses on a relatively small assortment of familiar species of animals: domesticated companion animals, livestock, animals used in laboratory research, furbearing species, game animals, exotic pets and so on. But consider, if you will, something different.

Consider a small, non-poisonous snake, maybe two feet long at maturity. It is called the eastern garter snake and it can be found throughout most of North America, from Florida all the way up to the shores of James Bay, in the boreal forests of northern Ontario and Quebec, as far east as Nova Scotia and west out into the prairies. There is a lot of variety of color, and experts may differ as to which populations might belong to a different subspecies, but that does not bother the garter snakes, nor need it concern us with regard to the story I am about to tell.

Although there are millions of garter snakes, I want you to consider just a tiny number of them, a few hundred, perhaps, or even less, found in a corner of a large city near where I live, Toronto. The place I have in mind is down where the bottom of the city meets the northern shore of Lake Ontario. It is a landfill area; an artificial extension of the shore consisting of uncounted tonnes of earth placed into the shallow, inshore waters of the lake. It's a big lake; you can't see its far shore, but if you could, you'd be seeing Buffalo, New York, and possibly the mists of Niagara Falls. Both become visible from the tops of Toronto's tallest buildings.

Anyway, these snakes are normally colored in longitudinal stripes of black and light, bright green. One group of closely related garter snakes, members of the same genus, are called ribbon snakes, because of that long, ribbon-like pattern of contrasting colors running the length of the animals. But these particular eastern garter snakes to which I refer are surprisingly different: they are black. You might see, if you look closely, some trace of the pattern and color of more typical animals, but for some reason there is this pocket of garter snakes showing large amounts of melanism ... the term we give to animals who are more heavily pigmented than normally.

It's not that unusual. Toronto also hosts a large population of gray squirrels that are not gray; they are also black. We take them for granted, they outnumber the gray, and some local folks think they are a different species from the gray, but they are not. Melanism is common in some species or populations of animals, like the red-tailed hawk in western North America, and it is rare or unknown in others, most others, in fact. It is not racial variation, which may be reflected in greater or lesser amounts of pigmentation in many species, including our own, but what we used to call a "color phase," and is now more commonly called a "morph."

Okay, so we have these unusually black-colored eastern garter snakes, minding their own business, down at the bottom of the city. They are not far from gritty fuel-storage areas, an industrial incinerator, shipping docks, and other accouterments to heavy-duty mechanization that are not representative of the sorts of regions where most people look for wildlife. There is a special reason why one small area particularly appeals to them, and we'll get to that shortly. First, I want you to consider something I would think was quite dreadful. I want you to consider these animals being very badly hurt. I want you to think of them being crushed and broken. I want you to consider them being suffocated, squeezed until their skins split; tortured until they die.

Does the thought of such things happening to these innocent animals bother you as much as it does me? If it does let me reassure you, it didn't happen. It might have, it almost did, but it didn't. Mind you, if you think that because they are "only" reptiles it wouldn't matter, read no further. If you don't care you won't want to hear what the threat was and how it was stopped. This is for people who do care.

There is no doubt a reason why this large percentage of black eastern garter snakes live in Toronto, but I'm not sure anyone knows what it is. Leave the snakes for a moment and consider our black gray squirrels. They are gray squirrels, but they are black, not gray, just as some black bears are brown, not black ... confusing, of course, because we tend to name things before we learn enough about them to choose names that consistently make sense. It is assumed that the black coloring absorbs the warmth of the sun better than does gray. Given the relative lack of predators within the city the fact that black tends to stand out more than gray may not matter as much as it would out in the countryside. Oh, sure, a black squirrel running across a snow-covered city park is more likely to be seen and eaten by a cruising red-tailed hawk than a gray, statistically speaking. But there may be fewer red-tailed hawks on the prowl than in the rural areas. There are certainly more squirrels in the city than in the country, because, paradoxical as it sounds, there is more for them to eat. With both gray colored gray squirrels and black colored gray squirrels living in large numbers, side by side, the theoretical statistical edge for survival of the black colored animals ... a decreased need for winter food because they use up less energy keeping warm ... accounts for their greater numbers. Within this specific context, the disadvantages of blackness are outweighed by the advantages.

And the black colored garter snakes? Well, the food base for them is obviously not the human handouts, bird feeders, weedlots, and acorn-bearing oak trees in city parks, ravines, and cemeteries that are so very supportive of gray squirrels of either tone. What the reptiles eat is mostly small leopard frogs. Also the snakes dine on grasshoppers, and sometimes mice or baby birds or even minnows. Most of those things are not found in the winter, so in the winter the snakes hibernate. Most of those things are not found in great abundance in city parks, either. But the place of which I speak is filled with small melt ponds and close to the water's edge. Obviously there's enough of what garter snakes eat for them to live there.

Nearby is something called the Leslie Street Spit, a finger of land, consisting entirely of landfill, that extends several miles out into Lake Ontario. The Spit, as it is familiarly known, is mantled by a vegetative cover that arrived all on its own, growing increasing complex and diverse year by year ... a process called succession. And the Spit hosts a similarly increasing variety of wildlife, all of which has slowly colonized this human-made sanctuary. Of course it was never intended to be a sanctuary; that just happened. There are nesting colonies of ring-billed gulls, common terns, double-crested cormorants and black-crowned night herons on the Spit. There are lots of songbirds, and waterfowl. Foxes and coyotes live there, and sometimes a deer or beaver is seen. It's an odd place, right at the base of the city, where humans and wildlife intermingle. Hikers, dog-walkers, bikers, joggers, birdwatchers, and photographers have access to it each weekend and holiday; and most of the time most of them never notice garter snakes, either black colored or the normal green ones. During the working days dump trucks continue to dump load after load after load of fill as the Spit, formerly called the East Toronto Headland, continues to grow, truckload by truckload.

At the foot of the Leslie Street Spit, among the "clean landfill" that has been dumped, are slabs of concrete and black asphalt from broken up roadways. This is not pristine wilderness. But "pristine wilderness" is a concept more important to us than to garter snakes.

Those slabs of rocks, broken up roadway and sidewalk, may even seen ugly to us but, with a mantle of weedy tangles and briers growing up among them, they are ideal for garter snakes, full of crevices and miniature caves for hiding or hibernating, and flat surfaces for sunning. And many of them are dark colored, rather like the black colored garter snakes. In this tiny ecological microcosm they, more than the "normal" green garter snakes, blend in. The black garter snakes have a statistical edge in surviving over the green. As zoologists say, they are slightly more likely to be "selected for" than the green ones, and thus pass on the genes that determine that darkness of tone. Forget the speciation taking place on the distant and exotic Galapagos Islands, we have our own tentative and fragile first tiny step in a possible separation of gene pools that could lead to speciation right here in Toronto, although we may have to wait some centuries, or millennia, to see if it happens.

But there was a problem. The area was not zoned to be left alone. Long ago it was zoned parkland. That seemed reasonable at the time. How could naturalists, conservationists, or animal protectionists, and certainly how could people like me who are all three, object? Isn't this what we want ... protection against "development"? A place away from buildings and factories and depots and oily, grime textured industrial wasteland and dump sites?

Well, as it happens, "park" in this case meant a driving range for golfers. It also meant "clearing out" or "cleaning up" the very brush and vegetation, and concrete blocks and asphalt slabs, that made suitable habitat for the black garter snakes. But there was another group of us concerned. This is one of the most popular places for birders. That's because it's a popular place for birds.

Actually, "popular" is a bit misleading. We're talking about both breeding birds who have special habitat requirements, but more than that, we're also talking about spring and fall migrants. Migrant birds have a problem. At each leg of their migration they must have a place to rest up and feed, a "staging area," as it's called with regard to such species as shorebirds and waterfowl. But it's not less important to the small, highly migratory insectivorous species, such as warblers, thrushes, vireos, wrens, flycatchers, and so on. And also the seed-eaters who pass through in the late fall or spend the winter. As it happens, the Leslie Street Spit, including the base that was slated for "development" as a park with a driving range, provides habitat for all these birds. Hence the birders, who didn't want to lose those birds. For the birds the continued loss of suitable staging grounds on their migratory rates can be disastrous. As more and more area is urbanized these small pockets of suitable habitat become all the more important for their very survival (see "Birds on a Collision Course," Mainstream, Summer 1997 for a discussion of light hazards to migrant birds and what is being done about it).

And then there are the gulls and the geese and the pigeons. No one complains about white-crowned or Lincoln's sparrows, bay-breasted warblers, ovenbirds, dark-eyed juncos or sedge wrens who may find a place to rest and feed at the site in question. But Toronto hosts huge numbers of Canada geese, ring-billed gulls (who nest on the Spit in the tens of thousands) and, as does most cities, pigeons. These birds, as species, certainly lack the critical needs of, say, a red knot or a cerulean warbler, for viable habitat. They have plenty. So much that their numbers cause many human city dwellers to complain, a lot! Ironically, the proposed park, while destroying habitat for the birds who most need it, would create excellent habitat for the most common species; species who were not that welcome.

Geese require mowed grass, or turf, for grazing. If allowed to grow long and weedy, it does them no good and they stay away. Flat lawns, like those in parks and driving ranges, are perfect, and the most attractive of all is mowed lawn that adjoins large bodies of water, like Lake Ontario. Flat lawns also encourage shallow ponds, grass-bottomed, and thus of little value to shorebirds, but perfect for gulls. Even pigeons may be attracted to such areas.

In other words, the park didn't make much sense in terms of either human interests and values or in terms of environmental needs, but the land was zoned for park.

We won. We got the place rezoned, and the bulldozers didn't move in, the songbirds still can be found there, you'll still see common snipe and dunlin there in the spring and fall, and maybe the odd woodcock, and snow buntings and juncos, and maybe longspurs, in the winter. And the snakes didn't get crushed.

Afterward I was amused by a letter to a birders' list on the internet from a University of Toronto student more or less claiming victory for saving the area from development. He certainly deserves credit. He posted messages asking all birders who had ever enjoyed that area to write to the appropriate politicians, and many did. That helped. But it also helped that many of us worked hard to elect the very politician in whose riding that region was located. You see, he might not be an "animal rights" advocate, but he is sympathetic to our concerns, and so we worked hard to help him to get elected. One of my co-directors of Zoocheck-Canada even works for him, although she must therefore be careful not to exert undue influence. So yes, we were there, too, working behind the scenes.

Mainly it was a matter of showing how illogical it was to build the park; of building a good argument while not annoying those people whose decision would make the difference. It meant disabusing people of cherished but simplistic notions (parks are good; unmanicured dump-sites are bad). We were careful not to say anything nasty about golfers (who have other places where driving ranges would not cause the kinds of problems or interfere with other uses of the region as would derive from one put at the base of the Spit).

I had a very personal reason for my own modest role in this endeavor. I have a memory from early childhood of standing on a piled up mound of bulldozed earth, not far from where the black garter snakes live, and watching black terns flying out over a vast expanse of cattail marsh. The earth I stood on was part of a project that placed a sewage disposal plant on the site and completely destroyed the site. I didn't know it at the time, but that marsh had gained some ornithological fame for supporting another "morph," something called the Cory's least bittern. For a while there was speculation that it was a distinct species, but it was determined that, in fact, it was a color morph, like the black-colored gray squirrel or the black-colored garter snake. The Cory's least bittern is (assuming any are left) a dark chestnut color in areas where the normally-colored least bittern is a light buff color.

Cory's least bitterns have shown up in many areas, it's true, but one of the centers of distribution was Ashbridge's Bay, a giant marsh where the sewage disposal plant and the Leslie Street Spit now are, with no trace of the marsh remaining. Whether or not Toronto's Cory's least bitterns would have continued to thrive or would breed selectively, we'll never know. We destroyed their primary home and I, as a child, was simply too young to even know about, let alone try to correct, the situation.

And those black terns that swooped down at me that long ago day as they defended their nesting territories? Well, the species is in serious decline and even disappeared as a breeding species in New York State, just across the water from where Ashbridge's Bay once hosted what might have been their largest nesting colony, certainly in this region.

Recently I heard that a book was being written about the history of Ashbridge's Bay. I offered to do some art for it, and my offer was accepted. I drew a Cory's least bittern, and a small group of black terns; the latter sketch will go on the cover.

We saved the snakes. A little victory? Yes. API was a part of it, working cooperatively, quietly, effectively. It's not the sort of thing we do fund-raisings on or write Mainstream articles about, but it is the sort of thing our members make possible through their generosity; the sort of day-to-day activity all program staff engage in during those odd moments between the bigger, more contentious, better-known campaigns to help animals.

The snakes are still there. They never knew how close they came to being crushed by the massive forces of earth-moving machinery driven by people who would probably never knowingly hurt another creature, but would do so anyway, had we not intervened. This business of protecting animals that so obsessively occupies us has few victories but we do talk about the big ones when they happen. But I thought you might like to know about a small one. Big or small, there are none that are not important.