Snakes On The Plains

Autumn is the season when our slithery friends the snakes wriggle home to their hibernaculms for cozy, winter-long snoozing. If you've ever seen a garter snake den this time of year you'll know it's a spectacular sight: thousands of the squiggly funsters undulating willy-nilly around their winter homes and just being generally big-eyed, benevolent and goddamn cute. (Don't argue with me, you know it's true.)

In the spirit of this most serpenty season, today's Globe and Mail has an article on a seniors' complex in Inwood, Manitoba (about an hour north of Winnipeg) that's been completely overrun by our noodle-bodied amigos:

At Inwood Manor, a Manitoba Housing complex 80 kilometres north of Winnipeg, residents have been finding the reptiles in the strangest places this month. “Yesterday I found one curled up in my clothes,” said 84-year-old Shirley Thiessen. “I said to him, ‘You don't pay rent' and picked him up and tossed him outside.”

But the cold-blooded free-loaders keep coming – in such droves that the local MLA, Conservative Ralph Eichler, raised the issue in the legislature Wednesday.

You can read Patrick White's article--which also contains the gruesome description of an elderly snake murderer's grisly deeds--here (The Globe And Mail).

To conclude, yay snakes!

This post is dedicated to Markian Saray, who coined the term "funsters" for snakes. God bless you, good sir. Wherever you are.