At a time when conservationists already have only a short stretch of morning light to spot pregnant Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes, haze from Canadian wildfires cut that window even further, raising the chance the snakes would go underground or give birth before they could be relocated.
Because the species is so diminished in the state, missing even one pregnant snake can matter. Each missed animal is one less opportunity to help restore a threatened native population in Ohio.
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According to WVXU, in Champaign County’s Killdeer Plains Wildlife Area, Greg Lipps, a conservation biologist with the Columbus Zoo & Aquarium and Ohio State University’s coordinator of amphibian and reptile conservation, worked with research technicians Jennifer Myers and Marnie Behan to look for gravid, or pregnant, massasaugas in waist-high grass. The smoke-dimmed sunlight made that job tougher by changing how the ground warmed and by reducing the period when basking snakes were easiest to see.
Once reported in 28 counties, massasaugas may now remain in as few as eight. Ohio designated the species as endangered in 1996, and it later received federal threatened status in 2016…