Chris Buelow navigates his pickup truck down a wooded, gravel road 70 miles west of Boston. As he crests over a hill, the forest gives way to a valley of shrubs, dotted with pine and oak trees: the Muddy Brook Wildlife Management Area in Hardwick.
Buelow, a senior restoration ecologist for MassWildlife, parks his pickup on a sandy patch of soil. He gestures to a low pile of boulders mixed with gnarled tree roots.
"Doesn't look like much," he said.
But below ground, Buelow and his team have built a snake hotel, of sorts. The hibernaculum is made of layers of salvaged concrete, cinder blocks, concrete pipes and boulders that trap heat, methodically placed to create passages that reach the bottom of the pit.
Eleven feet underground, well below the frost line, this 20-by-20 foot hibernaculum is designed to keep the reptiles warm over winter. It's new, and Buelow hopes slithery customers will check in once temperatures drop. This "hotel" is just the most recent effort from state wildlife agencies to preserve and diversify this important habitat for rare plants and animals that thrive in forests that regularly burn.
A 'hotel' like no other
Buelow expects several snake species to use it: ribbon snakes, green snakes and the elusive hog-nosed snake. But the hotel's main clientele, he hopes, will be the North American racer, a black snake that grows four to six feet long.
The racer is an important part of the ecosystem: it eats chipmunks, mice and even other snakes. Mike Jones, a state herpetologist who focuses on endangered amphibians and reptiles, is hoping to intervene before their prey cause too much damage.
"A lot of these small rodents are not things we want around in numbers — they're either tick vectors, farm pests," Jones said.
But in Muddy Brook, racers have been on the decline, with only a handful of snakes spotted in recent years. Statewide, racers are classified as a "species of greatest conservation need": they're not endangered, but they are vulnerable.
Jones said the main reason for that is humans. Though racers are completely harmless to people, people aren't harmless to them and often accidentally run them over or kill them out of fear. Officials know that, locally, people have sometimes sought snakes out just to kill them, which is why the new hibernaculum is surrounded by a barbed wire fence.
Muddy Brook drew from the success of a similar project in Martha's Vineyard, where black racers also face threats from roads. Last year, conservation organization BiodiversityWorks built two small hibernacula on the island. So far, they've seen snakes using them in the late fall and early spring and they hope they'll continue in the winter.
Targeted projects like these that support a single species are becoming more needed, says Luanne Johnson, a wildlife biologist and the director of BiodiversityWorks.
"The days of just setting aside conservation land and thinking that that's enough, those days are quickly going into the rearview mirror," she said. "We need to be more hands-on than we used to be when habitat was more expansive and connected than it is today."
Pine barrens
The racer is just the latest attempt to preserve and restore Muddy Brook.
Over 500 acres of this area used to be covered in a dense forest of white pine, with a thick carpet of pine needles. But those needles smothered other species.
Buelow with MassWildlife lives nearby and would walk through the forest, picking up small clues that reminded him of pine barrens in places like Montague and Falmouth. He saw species unique to pine barrens, which are more ecologically diverse and have sparser tree cover, were hidden in the dense forest.
"I would start seeing some of those commonalities. Seeing the pitch pine, the scrub oak, and just thinking through, 'Well, why is this here and not elsewhere?'" Buelow said.
The answer was fire.
MassWildlife did an analysis of ancient pollen at Muddy Brook and discovered the area had seen regular fire for 5,000 years, up until about 75 years ago. Buelow pored over history books and oral histories and determined with his colleagues that Muddy Brook was a "cryptic barrens": a barrens landscape that had gone so long without controlled burns and wildfires it had become unrecognizable.
They started the restoration by clearing white pine for lumber and holding controlled burns.
A rich biodiversity returned.
"We had four endangered plants come out in the seed bank. We had one of the rarest bees in North America show up here," Buelow said. Now, there are more than 1,500 species of moths in the Muddy Brook valley.
He's hopeful racers will come back, too. The snakes are drawn to the open space of barrens, where they can bask in the sunshine, and the valley has the capacity to support a large population. But only a few snakes have been spotted recently, even though the barrens are restored and healthy.
Buelow hopes the new snake hotel will help the population thrive — and also prevent the snakes from having to travel far for a winter habitat and ending up as road kill.
He says it could be too late for this snake population to rebound here. But pine barrens species are known for being resilient, so he holds out hope.
"Whether that applies to [the] black racer, we're gonna find out," Buelow said.
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