How Elk Island National Park is working to protect garter snakes from road deaths

A garter snake is pictured on a road in Georgian Bay.

Elk Island National Park is asking drivers to slow down along Highway 16 and throughout the park to help protect garter snakes, frogs and other animals.

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“It’s when they (snakes) do it across the road that it becomes problematic, because there’s traffic and we have one of the highest visitation densities in North America or in Canada for national parks,” said Ramona Maraj, an ecologist with Elk Island National Park.

“Since we have a lot of traffic that comes in and that ends up killing the snakes as they’re crossing the road to get to their hibernacula.”

According to a 2021 blog post from the Royal Alberta Museum, garter snakes’ hibernacula are protected under the Alberta Wildlife Act and disturbing or destroying them can significantly reduce their population in the area.

Maraj says the park has high human-caused mortality rates from high traffic volumes. Last year, five bison were killed in a collision at the park. Two years ago the park began a study to get an idea of what species of animals were getting killed and how they could prevent it from happening.

“We would go out and look for roadkill on various segments of the road and then find snakes or frogs or toads and sometimes we found larger things, like coyotes and sometimes we found birds,” Maraj told CTV News Edmonton.

Hitting a garter snake on your drive into or out of the city may not seem like a big deal, but Maraj says the reptiles are important to the ecosystem as they’re considered a mid-level predator.

Snake prey on insects and other small animals.

“What’s great about snakes is that they keep populations of insects in check that other species can’t, because snakes are really well adapted to being able to eat those,” Maraj said.

While garter snakes migrate in the fall, Maraj says they’re also at risk of being killed in the summer since they love to bask in the sun on the hot asphalt.

“To some people, they just look like little tar cracks, and then they get run over as well,” Maraj said.

Within the two years the park has been surveying, it estimates thousands of snakes have been killed during that time.

Maraj says the park and Strathcona County have been putting out signs to remind drivers to slow down. If you do see a snake, try to let it pass and be aware of little black cracks in the road, because it could be a snake trying to find its way home.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Ali Yusuf