History

Death rattle: a B.C. priest’s war on rattlesnakes

A look at the devastating environmental toll and the unlikely positive influence a historical conflict with rattlesnakes had on Canadian herpetology

Aug 23, 2024
734 words
3 minutes

By Shane Fraser

A coiled rattlesnake in the Vernon area. While this population of western rattlesnakes was hunted by Mackie and others to near extinction in the 1930s and 40s, the population appears to have since rebounded. (Photo courtesy Museum and Archives of Vernon No. 11066)

Eleven year-old Roland Whittall had harassed his last rattlesnake. In search of a gift for his mother in 1927, the Vernon Prep School student hiked to a snake den above Deep Lake, B.C., armed with too short a stick. The would-be handbag bit him on the hand. After a botched antivenom run, Whittall became the second-last known person to die from a wild snake in British Columbia.

Whittall’s untimely demise galvanized the boy’s former headmaster, Rev. Augustine Clark Mackie, to launch a life-long crusade against the region’s rattlesnakes. Over the next three decades, Mackie would kill thousands of snakes in Vernon, the greater Okanagan, much of B.C.’s southern interior, and into Alberta. In the process, he earned himself the title “Modern St. Patrick” — and the combined ire and awe of naturalists everywhere.

Reverend Augustine Clark Mackie displays a dead rattlesnake in Rolling Hills, Alta., in 1957. His rattlesnake crusade lasted from 1930 until 1961, shortly before his death in 1965. (Photo courtesy Museum and Archives of Vernon, No. 16693)

Mackie was born in Great Britain in 1879 and became an Anglican minister in 1902. A servant of God and Empire, he moved to the Syilx homeland in 1913 and founded Vernon Preparatory School to impart British culture on British Columbian boys. He spent his time praying, caning, exploring Vernon’s landscape and, eventually, rattlesnaking.

The western (northern Pacific) rattlesnake is at the top of its range in B.C., dodging the cold in cliffside crevices since the end of the Ice Age. Between 1930 and 1934, Mackie vanquished a total of 204 rattlesnakes at two known dens: one ceremoniously dubbed “Whittall” and another, “Leech,” named for a student who was, thankfully, not bitten. In 1935, when these dens appeared empty, Mackie moved on to more distant ones, using everything from a three-pronged spear to guns, horsewhips, elaborate traps and even explosives to dispatch his quarry.

While it’s tempting to picture Mackie in a snakeskin cassock, cursing serpents before blowing them to smithereens like a Looney Tunes villain, he was a reserved man who hardly spoke of revenge and carefully documented his “collections.” Enduring fang pricks, vole plagues and a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mackie continued his war on the snakes until 1961, when age and illness finally caught up with him. By that time, the accomplished snake seeker had slaughtered or captured 3,790 snakes (2.41 kilometres worth of snakes, from end to end). His single-day record was 89 snakes, accomplished with a partner at age 75.

Mackie on a hunting trip in Buffalo Lake, B.C. In addition to rattlesnakes, the reverend was an avid hunter of game birds. (Photo courtesy Museum and Archives of Vernon No. 16620)

Interestingly, Mackie’s detailed notes — on the rattlesnakes’ prey, habitat, brumation, migration, size (Mackie reported the longest western rattlesnake known to science at 1.626 metres), reproduction, strike range and temperament — were invaluable to American herpetologist Laurence Klauber. In 1956, he published Rattlesnakes, a 1,500-page treatise that’s still considered an authoritative resource for any student of these vipers.

Mackie also gave Klauber, the first curator of reptiles and amphibians at the San Diego Natural History Museum, nearly two dozen of his victims. The Royal BC Museum accepted hundreds more Mackie specimens, including rattlesnakes, birds, and a live racer and gopher snake. And some of Mackie’s live-caught rattlers went to Ottawa for research that would inevitably prove fatal to the snakes.

“Speaking generally they are timid and secretive in their habits, never assuming the offensive without provocation but preferring to lie low until almost trodden on,” Mackie wrote of the rattlesnakes he had spent so many years massacring. He admitted that, despite his prodigious bodycount, fears of infestation were absurd: “They are very localised and their pursuit entails a good deal of physical effort and energy. Many people who have lived here [Vernon/Coldstream] for 30 years have yet to see their first one.”

Mackie, far right, with his brother, Hugh, and sister-in-law, Grace, at a cricket match at Vernon Preparatory School. The trio established the school in 1913. (Photo courtesy Museum and Archives of Vernon No. 28725)

In 2004, 39 years after Mackie’s death, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada announced that he had driven the species almost to local extinction. “Almost” is key. Herpetologist J.M. Macartney travelled to Mackie’s oldest kill sites in the early 1980s, notably the area around the “Whittall” den. There, among corroded .22 shells and cemented holes, he found rattlesnakes thriving. Though Mackie had dispatched over 400 rattlers on that ridge, Macartney tallied 659 alive, indicating that this population had “recovered from the decimation it suffered in the past.”

Today, though the western rattlesnake is protected under Canadian law, the species remains threatened — by motorists and developers rather than preachers. And in a balancing of the scales of justice, contemporary researchers are still using Mackie’s exhaustive data to save the snakes he once tried so hard to destroy.

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This story is from the July/August 2024 Issue

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