Pilot blacksnake
“Does overwhelming change, the annihilation of all you know, create an intensity of memory that would not have existed otherwise?” – Charles Frazier
Surely the Creelman’s, inhabitants of the old homestead on the plateau were thoroughly acquainted with the holy grail of his later teens and early twenties. This being the great pilot blacksnake, alternatively black ratsnake, a shiny serpent of Pennsylvania-anthracite sheen, cable-strong constricting coils and handsome rectangular roman-nosed head with often virgin-white throat that could climb straight up the highest trees as though by magic and might reach eight feet in length. The stuff of local serpent-legends. One of those legends describing how this snake would lead other snakes to safety in times of peril, including rattlesnakes, hence the name pilot blacksnake, pilot snake, or rattlesnake pilot. While this is not likely true, the snake absolutely has about it all the air of a leader amongst snakes, deliberate, dignified and seemingly wise. No doubt rural folk noticed this, and then witnessed them at communal dens with other, apparently lesser species, and so the legend was formed. Whatever the case, the name has a fitting poetry to it. The current official fashion in Canada is to know this reptile by the common name, “gray ratsnake” in deference to its genetic associations. A nonsensical and unnecessary change. Not only are common names not meant to be subject to such strict scientific codes (they have Latin aliases for this purpose,) it is a fact that no person having witnessed one of these superb creatures ever came away saying, “You should have seen the long, shiny grey snake I saw!” People depict it invariably as a black snake, and so they shall remain, here.
Another trait attributed to this storied snake is its affinity for human dwellings, usually older barns, houses, and outbuildings. This legend is fact. Such buildings will serve as focal points of the snake’s territory (as do ancient trees with plenty of holes and hollows) to which they return again and again, and, being incredible climbers given the lack of legs, usually to ascend to some lofty perch to observe their domain, out from underfoot.
Creelman’s barn was one such focal point for these reptiles in the Vineland area. The Creelmans had described how they had known this reptile that lurked in the rafters of the old structure on their farm near Cherry Avenue, looking down on the old Model “A”. Certainly then these snakes were known by folks of the now-deceased Grandparent’s age, but they had lingered beyond that. Contemporaries of our own parents, the parents of friends and peers remembered them as well. Tom Shield’s mother had told of walking in the very ravine west of the old homestead’s hayfield and coming across “huge shiny blacksnakes”. Ron Derksen’s father remembered them from beneath the trestle that spanned the Jordan Pond where he had stepped on one and it had coiled up and around his boot. The Creelmans had not known them in the time since Squirrel-Eating Jon was born, 1964, yet still the question begged, were these reptiles only memories, phantoms, or were they still extant as relics here and there? Were there yet some surviving into our time in these places? It was certainly a mystery worth exploring.
In the years spanning our teens he did receive some tantalizing leads. One morning, classmate Victor Romagnoli came to school, Beamsville District Secondary – the same one Eating’s mother had attended before him – reporting that along the old King’s Highway #8 very near the corner of Tufford Road where he lived with two brothers and two sisters on his parent’s farm, he spotted a big shiny blacksnake that had been hit by a car while waiting for the schoolbus. Jon checked the spot out later but the snake must have been taken by a predator, perhaps a Turkey vulture, or even picked up by some other inquisitive naturalist. He could not find it, but Victor insisted it was very long and black and had white in the fore-belly. This would have been around 1980. Another lead he got was in a casual conversation around the same year with a man who, coming out of Kinsmen’s Park on the ridge above Beamsville had run over what he took to be a long black piece of conduit lying in the road, only to look in his rearview mirror to see it writhing, realizing to his surprise it had been a very large blacksnake. Eating explored the park but found nothing.
These events occurred close to home, places he could easily cycle to. He also began to garner some leads from a little further afield, though not too far. In a pickle jar full of formalin in his grade twelve biology lab were two big pilot blacksnakes, real beauts even in pickled death. They were not procured from some distant supply house, but rather were “collected,” teacher John VanDerBeek assured us, from along the Welland Canal, not far out of St. Catharines. And then there was a farmhand compatriot of Jon’s whom, around 1981 told me of fishing on a causeway at Lake Gibson, off Beaverdams Road and barely more than a stone’s throw from the canal and there was a snake – again hit by a car (and a pattern is emerging here hinting strongly at one primary agent of their general demise) – that was “long and shiny and black” and wasn’t one of the watersnakes he was familiar with in fishing there.
It was around this same year, the early spring of 1982, that Squirrel-Eating really believed he was going to hit paydirt in his country where this legendary reptile was concerned. He had a conversation at Red Bridge where it spanned the Twenty Creek between Vineland and Jordan that very much excited him. It was earliest spring, the end of March. Twenty Creek was a chocolate torrent. It was the time of year to net for spawning pike. The net was six feet by six feet on a frame that held it taught and bowed overarching over it. It was the same net we used to dip for smelt before the alien salmon ate them all. There were three ways of using this net. For smelt, they would go out onto Martin’s pier, and simply drop it over on a rope. For pike, you could dip from shore with a long pole that you wedged under your ass and sat back to lift, or, similar to the method used for smelt, you could drop it down off a bridge. The best places at Red Bridge were in the floodwater eddies that swirled up around the downstream side of the concrete abutments. Jon has caught pike there that looked like great logs sagging as the mesh emerged from the debris laden murk.
He was in conversation with one fisherman as he was packing up to leave, a gregarious middle aged man with dark hair and a beat-up ballcap. They were talking of fishing in the area in general. The man brought up one of his favorite spots for big catfish, and it was on a limestone-studded spit of semi-wooded land where the main channel of the Welland Canal splits off into a side-channel. Access was down a road where the fellow farmhand had seen the dead blacksnake. The man told of his fishing there but then added he no longer went there on account of his fear for snakes. Asked to elaborate he told of being finally too spooked by the big blacksnakes that always seemed to arrive as he sat quietly on the bank waiting for some action to return there. Asked if they were watersnakes, and he said no, much larger, and besides a fellow had killed one and taken it to the wildlife office in Fonthill where the warden exclaimed that it was a ‘black racer,’ a snake he had “not seen in the area for years.” (‘Black racer’ being the misnomer that seemed to be generally applied to the pilot blacksnake in the Niagara area. Eating’s biology teacher had referred to the pickled snakes by this same name, which is the common name for another snake that does not occur in Canada.) This business with the fisherman and the snakes had been within the past year.
The day was cool down on the old bed of Lake Iroquois thanks to a breeze off Lake Ontario, but over the limestone escarpment it was much warmer. It was emergence time for snakes. Squirrel-Eating Jon made it to the place described by the fisherman. There was no question he was in the right place. The scene could have served as a textbook picture of “pilot blacksnake habitat.” Mind you, it was not a entirely natural situation. Here we had one of those cases where mans’ activities had undoubtedly improved a very localized spot for the big reptiles. Excavation of the famous shipping conduit was begun in 1824 and went through several modifications, not to be completed until 1932. All of this occurred of course before World War II, before the extreme environmental degradation wrought by rapid urban expansion and chemical based agriculture, so the region was undoubtedly still liberally salted with snakes. The area of the spit was one where the limestone bedrock was at or near the surface. Millions of tons of this rock were deposited in low boulder piles and man-made eskers of the same in this spot between two channels. Once the ruckus was done with, this undoubtedly created some incredible thermoregulatory conditions for a northern reptile. The rock would have absorbed the sun and radiated it back, creating a local microclimate within the microclimate of Niagara, and because there was little topsoil near the end third of the spit, the regenerating growth was limited mostly to patches of dense hawthorn scrub and scattered poplars, offering plentiful and almost impenetrable cover at regular intervals while still maintaining plentiful openings to the let the sun through. And yet there was still forest as well on this spit, a little to the north, as well as great field of giant reed that towered over your head like sugarcane, that must have been filled with rodent prey. The whole being dotted with little wetlands and ponds. In other words, there was an amazing diversity of habitat within a very limited compass.
This was the scene that greeted Jon as he first came down the spit. He could almost taste the glistening black reptiles the situation seemed so ideal. He was convinced that this had to be the place where the snakes in the jar in his biology class had come from. He went to the area on the far side of the spit from the main canal where the man described his encounters having occurred. The bank sloped fairly steeply here down to gently swirling waters, the slope being a mosaic of hawthorn scrub and fairly open smaller rock debris. Everywhere you looked you expected to see one of the reptiles.
He searched the spit liberally that day, the shorelines, the rockpiles, the scrub, but found no pilot blacksnake. He did see gartersnakes, watersnakes, and uncovered a very nice milksnake under a piece of old carpet. One gartersnake came drifting by him in the flow of the back channel, coils so benumbed by the cold spring water he could no longer swim. He was close enough to the bank to be fished out and laid on the warm rocks. Who knows how far he may have drifted nor whether he would have lived.
Continuing reconnaissance of the area, he noted with some chagrin that while at first glance the place had seemed relatively quiet, it was in truth well frequented at least at intervals by homo. There were many trails spider-webbing the place, mostly those made by off-road vehicles which at that time were primarly “dirt bikes.” While it was certainly a superb place for the ratsnakes habitat-wise, this evidence of regular human incursion, and not gentle incursion at that, was not a good sign. Furthermore, the total surface area of the place was not particularly large, certainly under a hundred acres in total, with the best habitat being less than that. Given that the rest of the region had been highly modified – for agriculture, housing, and roads, any population occurring here was bound to be an isolated relict, another last-stand. Had he finally arrived in time to witness some remaining individuals?
Jon remained convinced for a long span that he had arrived in time, that some of the big blacksnakes still haunted the place in earthly form. And well they may have. But that does not change the fact that search as he might, over all suitable seasons from spring emergence to fall denning time, over a span of almost a decade, he failed to find a single one of the great snakes that had been so recently abundant as to put one avid fisherman off the spot for good. It hardly seemed possible that he could have observed them like this so readily by accident, whereas Eating himself could not come up with a single one despite a thoroughness of searching driven by his heights of passion for the subject, but this is so often the way it works in the woods. Was it possible that he had witnessed the last of them, that fishermen like the fellow who killed the one taken to the game warden had finished off the last individuals literally just before Eating arrived on the scene? It is possible, and certainly in situations like this, each individual is significant. But the fact is, in situations like this where populations are so close to extirpation, it can become very difficult to ascertain whether an animal still exists or not in habitat like this. It is so easy for a tiny group of stragglers to evade detection – it’s the classic “needle in the haystack” scenario, as we will illustrate definitively with this same enigmatic snake species later in the tale.
Jon believes it is not impossible that a handful of the legendary black constrictors are still there on that spit to this day, nearly three decades later. There along the quieter stretches of the canal and the rocky shores of adjacent Lake Gibson. He would like to go back there again, in fact, with a canoe perhaps this time, and resume the search. It is the sort of challenge he likes.
While the search of this particular spot undoubtedly represented the climax of his search for the reptilian grail of his homeland in terms of any likelihood of success, it was not the end of the leads to come where this species was concerned. It seemed hardly a year went by during the 1980’s when some new compelling sighting didn’t emerge in the course of conversation with someone engaged in outdoor work or recreation. A few years following Jon’s introduction to the spit on the Welland Canal an agriculturist served up another tale that could not be ignored. During his work, he had for some reason found himself in an area adjacent Port Colborne and not too far from the Lake Erie shore. He described a level area of vacant scrubland and of significant acreage, where the bedrock was at the surface, and dotted with rock piles. He had been engaged in this dryland habitat when he ran, much to his amazement, across “an indigo snake.” Now, the indigo is a subtropical snake that ranges no closer to Ontario than coastal Georgia. It, like the pilot blacksnake, is one of the continent’s handful of largest snake species, and it too is black, with an indigo sheen. There was only one snake in Ontario that might lend the impression of being one of these, and that snake was of course the pilot blacksnake.
Off he went again, but again, he found no Pilot blacksnake. On his way back to Vineland that trip, he took an access road to the south edge of the Wainfleet Bog, once legendary for rattlesnakes. He approached a middle-aged farmer on the last farm before the bog proper. He asked him about pilot blacksnakes. Did he know them, or had he? Yes he had, and he too called them “black racers.” He was thoughtful a moment and related as to how it had been about a dozen years at that point since he had seen his last one. That would have placed his last sighting at sometime during the mid-1970’s. Asked about Massassaugas, he reflected that yes he had known them too, but had not seen one for about the same span of time. He also added that he was not particularly sad about this particular loss. A person can understand his point of view. Working daily around big populations of cryptic little venomous snakes, engaged in work that involved hands at ground level regularly, must be something of a strain. The man said he used to find them regularly bound to his haybales during haying time and even in the nest boxes of his hens. On the other hand, a certain failure of perspective, of wonder, of the imagination must also be at play here to be grateful for the colour leaching from your world. At any rate, in talking with this fellow it first occurred the emerging picture of what had taken place with the reptiles in this general region. A situation in which a turning point occurred during the 1970’s, marked by some event, factor, or threshold of cumulative factors being reached, resulting in the significant rapid-onset declines so the hallmark of tipping points. It’s a very simple equation: past a certain point, more people = less of everything else. Few even notice when it’s the snakes disappearing, and fewer yet care. But when it’s jobs, food supplies, quality of democracy or even a climate conducive to civilization hitting a tipping point by the same mechanisms that much further in-play, we begin to understand why it’s important to heed the earlier warning signs. Evidence suggests we still don’t understand this. The situation with the pilot blacksnake is echoed in far flung corners of the continent. A parallel situation has occurred for instance with the kingsnakes of Florida, another top-of-the-pyramid serpent. Same process, same timelines. They were there, most everywhere, and now most everywhere, they’re not. (Refer to the excellent video featuring this snake and its diversity in the context of this process, below. We could find no similar film summary involving the pilot blacksnake of Ontario.) It’s not a process limited to the northern frontier then, but rather one common to any place where human densities have become problematic, and not just problematic for snakes. By the time you notice (or not) that the snake populations are suffering, conditions in the human sphere are in decline as well.
edges of belly scutes that aid greatly in climbing trees.
This adult also retains obvious spotted hatchling/juvenile pattern as many do. Note also the bulge in the snake’s body…
Squirrel-Eating Jon is not the only vertebrate that likes to eat squirrels.
Squirrel-Eating Jon’s search for the great, storied blacksnake of the Niagara Peninsula, once so broadly known and liberally spread, marked the end of his real herpetological focus on the decaying region. Although compelling, the disappointments he had endured chasing phantoms eventually pushed him farther afield. He was driving by that point, after-all, not nearly so confined by space. He began to focus his attentions on the last great reptile strongholds of Ontario, places that still remained like Vineland had undoubtedly once been, back in simpler, cleaner, quieter times.
What Rough Beast 