Mingo National Wildlife Refuge’s Lesser Known Migration National
Wildlife Refuge Week: October 14-20, 2012 The Cottonmouth snake
is a common sighting at Mingo National Wildlife Refuge during
fall migration. Photo by Vergial Harp/USFWS. During National
Wildlife Refuge Week visitors to Mingo National Wildlife Refuge
in Missouri often get to experience two very different types of
migration. The first type of migration is the push of migratory
birds that utilize the bottomland hardwood forests and marshes
of Mingo Refuge as stopover or wintering habitat. What’s the
second type of migration, you ask? Snakes! Yes, that’s right.
Some snakes actually do migrate, just on a much smaller scale
than that of migratory birds. At Mingo, snakes will migrate out
of the swamps and bottomland habitat up into the bluffs that
surround the Mingo Basin and they are doing that right now!
National Wildlife Refuge Week usually marks the peak of this
movement, with many of the 22 different species of snakes at
Mingo Refuge crossing ref