Illinois Natural History Survey Reports

              1
ILLINOIS
NATURAL
HISTORY
SURVEY R e p o r t s
Spring 2005
No. 383
I N S I D E
Wetlands of the Upper
Sangamon River
Watershed: Compari-sons
to the National
Wetlands Inventory
2
Arthropod Diversity in
the Calumet Region
3
In Memoriam
Frank C. Bellrose
4
Species Spotlight:
Fairy Shrimp
6
The Naturalist’s
Apprentice: Illinois
Crustaceans
7
New INHS Publication
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Help Support Critical
INHS Research
through Donations
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Continued on back page
An adult massasauga rattlesnake residing at Allerton Park in Piatt County.
Photo by Chris Phillips, INHS Center for Biodiversity
Baby massasaugas found at Allerton Park.
Photo by Chris Phillips, INHS Center for Biodiversity
The eastern massasauga rattle-snake
(Sistrurus sistrurus
catenatus) is one of the smallest
rattlesnakes in North America,
and by most accounts, it’s also
the rarest. In Illinois, only three
or four populations remain; one
of these is at Allerton Park in
Piatt County.
At the time of European
settlement, the massasauga could
be found in New York, Pennsyl-vania,
Ohio, Indiana, Ontario,
Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Mis-souri,
and the northern two-thirds
of Illinois. An 1893 account of
the abundance of the massasauga
in Illinois states: “On the prairies
of Illinois, before the country
became thickly populated, these
reptiles were extremely abun-dant,
and the killing of two or
three dozen of them in a season
was not an unusual thing for a
farmer’s boy. Now, in that same
region, not one is seen in years.”
Thus, by 1893 the massasauga
was already in
decline and its
status has only
gone downhill
since. Be-cause
of habi-tat
destruction
and outright
persecution, it
is found only
in scattered
colonies across
The Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake at
Allerton Park
its former range, where it is af-forded
legal protection at the state
and province levels.
There have been records of
sporadic encounters with massas-augas
in the vicinity of Allerton
Park and surrounding towns since
1937, but historically, S.
catenatus probably existed all
along the Sangamon River in
Piatt and Champaign counties. In
the early years of the operation of
the Allerton Estate as a park by
the University of Illinois, rattle-snakes
were routinely moved
from areas of high human traffic
on the north side of the Sanga-mon
River (such as the lawns and
formal gardens) to the restored
prairie on the south side. This
practice continued into the early
1980s when the number of en-counters
on the north side
dropped to less than one per year
and then stopped altogether.
In spring of 2000, Eric Smith,
a regional Heritage Biologist
with the Illinois Department of
Natural Resources, asked if it
would be worthwhile to start
searching for massasaugas at the
restored prairie at Allerton. Be-cause
so many individuals had
been moved to this area from
across the river, it seemed rea-sonable
to expect that some had
survived. Organized searches
utilizing volunteers were started
in spring 2000, but no massasau-gas
were encountered. In June of
2000 a University of Illinois
graduate student saw a massas-auga
sunning on one of his mam-mal
traps near the Allerton prai-rie.
This observation led to re-newed
efforts to find an adult