A researcher at the University of Manitoba is left with more questions than answers after discovering someone killed a group of snakes that were the subject of his thesis.
Neil Balchan is studying garter snakes in their natural habitat. His honours thesis is on the movement behavior and the usage of climatic cues among garter snakes.
To complete his project, Balchan visits a secluded area in a section of Manitoba known as the Interlake -- in between Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg -- three times a week. On Thursday, Balchan visited the snakes only to find more than 50 of them had been killed.
"There were dead snakes everywhere," Balchan told CTV Winnipeg. "They were killed fairly brutally. Some were clobbered with rocks or sticks, or whatever was around.
“There were animals just decapitated with their heads cleanly cut off."
One of the dead snakes was the very first one he marked for his project. It was aptly named “Number One.”
Balchan was measuring Number One’s growth and weight weekly and comparing the values over the changing seasons. Now that data gathering has come to an abrupt end.
"I have no explanation for it,” Balchan said. “I've been thinking and trying to rationalize it and there's no reason in my mind that someone would go out into the wild and do that kind of damage to an animal."
The Interlake area is known for being a hotbed for garter snakes. The province says during two brief periods in the year -- in early September when the snakes prepare for hibernation and in May when they emerge from their slumber -- you can see more of the snakes at a glance than anywhere else on the planet.
In a statement, Manitoba Sustainable Development said it is aware of the incident, but it happened on land outside the Narcisse Wildlife Management Area, so the snakes are not protected.
With a report from CTV Winnipeg’s Jon Hendricks
