During a typical year, some 55 million people pass through San Francisco International (SFO), the nation’s seventh-busiest airport. At some point during their journey to or from the terminal, each one of them will travel by a seemingly unremarkable 180-acre parcel of land, soggy and spartan, bounded by highways and train tracks, bisected by rows of power lines. It may look like any other overgrown vacant lot, but this one is home to the world’s largest population of the strikingly beautiful and highly endangered San Francisco garter snake. A recent study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) confirmed the presence of approximately 1,300 snakes at SFO’s West of Bayshore property — it’s the greatest concentration ever recorded.
The data represents a hard-won victory for Natalie Reeder, who has been working to keep the site snake-friendly for more than a dozen years, first as a consultant and now as the SFO airport biologist. She said airports usually hire scientists like her to keep animals out; her job is to make them stay. Reeder and her team are responsible for managing the “kind of nasty” West of Bayshore lot in an attempt to support the resplendent but reclusive snake.
Simply put, the San Francisco garter snake is a stunner. Famed herpetologist and guidebook author Robert Stebbins—a man who had seen a lot of snakes—once deemed it “the most beautiful serpent in North America.” Though it appears ostentatious, wearing bold stripes of turquoise and red down the length of its 4-foot-long body, the snake is notoriously introverted, quick to flee, and hard to capture. This has made getting an accurate census of them difficult.
Read more at Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: Greg Schechter via Wikimedia Commons
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