\u00a035 species of snakes have shut down nearly three miles of a southern Illinois road<\/a> to vehicles as their bi-annual migration peaks.<\/p>\nForest officials say thousands of snakes, as well as other reptiles and amphibians, use the road inside the Shawnee National Forest to travel back and forth between their feeding grounds in the nearby LaRue Swamp and their hibernation area in the surrounding bluffs. To protect the animals as they migrate, the 2.7-mile stretch of LaRue Road is now closed yearly from Sept. 1 to Oct. 30 and March 15 to May 15.<\/p>\n
Editor’s note: The above video originally aired in 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe No. 1 snake you\u2019re going to see here is going to be the Northern Cottonmouth,\u201d U.S. Forest Service Wildlife Biologist Mark Vukovich previously said. \u201cThe other two venomous snakes are the Copperhead and the Timber Rattlesnake. You have a good chance of seeing those.\u201d<\/p>\n
Visitors interested in looking at the snakes or participating in other recreational activities in the forest are still welcome to travel the “snake road” on foot. Vukovich said the best time to visit for serpent viewing is in October.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a great way to get people over that feeling that snakes are bad and they\u2019re nasty creatures,\u201d Vukovich said. \u201cThey\u2019re not. They\u2019re not at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Historic and cultural stereotypes against snakes are rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, according to the\u00a0University of Illinois’ Wildlife Epidemiology Laboratory<\/a>. In reality, the animals play a vital role in ecosystems worldwide, including controlling pest populations, offering a food source to larger predators, and helping maintain biodiversity by curbing invasive species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The road will stay closed through Oct. 30, but that isn’t stopping visitors from checking out the migration.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-173906","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}