There seem to have been two problems with the state’s plan to breed rattlesnakes on Mount Zion Island in the Quabbin Reservoir:
First, the idea just plain rattled many of the region’s residents and outdoors enthusiasts who are understandably nervous about sharing turf with a venomous viper.
And then there was the Boston-centric, unilateral way the state Fisheries and Wildlife Board developed the plan to bolster the population of the rattlesnake, which is endangered in Massachusetts and extinct in other New England states. Few if any people in the central and western counties who would be directly affected were brought into the process — until the news broke and all hell broke loose.
Since then, pressured by legislation that would have suspended the program, the state agency formed a 14-member Rattlesnake Review Working Group composed of local legislators and others with a strong interest in the Quabbin region and its outdoors environs.
The group met a handful of times and was supposed to offer recommendations to the state Fisheries and Wildlife Board about how the officials should manage the timber rattlesnakes in general.
But this month, the state wildlife agency put its plan to release 150 rattlesnakes in the Quabbin on hold “indefinitely.” Opponents of the plan were many and vocal in the past year as the working group and others held meetings. Many of those opponents are hoping this suspension will be the end of plans to revive the rattler.
Most critics, like former environmental police officer Anthony Brighenti of Athol, who sits on the North Quabbin Fishermen’s Association and the Quabbin Watershed Advisory Committee, said the plan had him concerned about public safety.
“We felt that we didn’t want ever, ever to get bitten by a timber rattler on the Quabbin Reservoir,” he said. “I think it was slim chance, but slim is not 100 percent. And that could interfere with access to the Quabbin.”
Brighenti said he understands the need to preserve the species but believes this can be done by releasing snakes to habitats they already have in the Berkshires and in the Blue Hills reservation, where apparently few know or care about their presence. (For now, at least.)
Brighenti is also on the Rattlesnake Review Working Group. Last we heard the advisory group’s fate was up in the air.
Some naturalists don’t understand the fuss or attribute it to a lack of understanding of rattlesnakes, which they argue pose less of a threat to humans than humans do to them. After all, it has been human depredation and encroachment on habitat that have brought the snake to the brink of extinction in this part of the country.
But we agree with Brighenti and feel the working group’s work isn’t done. Unless Fisheries and Wildlife truly has given up on helping to preserve the rattlesnakes, we think the agency should reassess its plans with the help of a working group of people who will literally have to live with the consequence of their decisions.
It may be, as Brighenti has said, that the state’s wildlife goals can be achieved by growing the populations of rattlers that exist now in the Blue Hills, a 6,000-acre state preserve southwest of Quincy, or in the Berkshires, and not by introducing them to the Quabbin.
Massachusetts may want to preserve an endangered species of poisonous snake on environmental conservation grounds, but the best plan for doing this without unduly endangering anyone will evolve from further study by the wildlife experts out of Boston in consultation with the residents who will have to live with the snakes.