10/12/2026
TRIGGER WARNING: Snake eating live prey.
Earlier this summer, ecologists from Midwest Friends of Wildlife (MFOWL) set up drift fences and camera traps at SWMLC’s LaGrange Valley Wetlands to check for Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake activity.
In a nutshell, this involves mounting a special close-range trail-camera inside an upside down 5-gallon bucket. Holes are cut into the rim to let small critters wander in and out. When an animal enters the “trap”, the camera captures their image.
It’s always fun to sort through the hundreds of photos to see who has stopped by. But this collection included a disturbing (but fascinating) sequence: a small garter snake wrestling with and trying to consume a fledgling songbird!
This is unusual. Garter snakes’ preferred foods are frogs and small fish, and plenty of frogs entered the camera trap at LaGrange Valley Wetlands. It’s a bit of a mystery why this one went for the baby bird.
But a 2016 article by William D. Halliday of the University of Ottawa, published in the Canadian Field Naturalist, collected some studies that indicated that “nestling and fledgling birds are a part, however rare, of the diet of Common Gartersnakes. In areas with a high density of ground nests and fledglings, young birds could make up a substantial part of the Common Gartersnake diet during part of the summer.”
Of course, we feel bad for the baby bird! But it’s also very interesting to see a rare phenomenon like this occur at one of our preserves – and to see it documented.
Thank you, MFOWL for helping us better understand the relationships between the animals that call our preserves home!
If you're interested, here's a link to the article we mentioned: https://www.canadianfieldnaturalist.ca/index.php/cfn/article/view/1838
