Expert tracks endangered snakes

Ohio’s go-to snake expert, a high school teacher, works to preserve several species.

FRIENDSHIP, Ohio (AP) — Ben Moore slowly swept the air with the antenna he held as he eased down a steep hillside thick with logs and underbrush.

He kept one eye on the ankle-deep leaves that covered the ground at Shawnee State Forest and the other on a receiver that hung from his neck and beeped softly.

Moore, an 18-year-old senior at Westerville North High School, was tracking snakes with science teachers Doug Wynn and John Birkhimer and fellow students.

This was no ordinary field trip. Wynn is a snake researcher, an expert the state has turned to for more than 20 years for information about Ohio species.

(One indication about the serious nature of the work: Birkhimer carried a GPS unit that had the closest hospitals mapped out, just in case.)

As the group neared a target, Wynn took Moore’s equipment and followed the increasingly loud beeps along two fallen trees. The sensor pointed him to the center of one of the trunks.

Wynn and a student lifted from one end of the trunk, and Birkhimer prodded the ground with putter-length snake tongs. A timber rattlesnake exploded from the hiding place and regrouped in a coil against the hillside, its tail a vibrating blur.

“God, he’s gorgeous,” said Kelsie Geyer, a Westerville North senior.

“The rule is they can strike one-third of their body length,” Wynn reminded his students. “But if they have something to push against, they can strike half their body length.”

No one crowded this snake, a 4-foot male weighing more than 3 pounds.

It’s a snake Wynn knows. He inserted a radio transmitter — about the size of a pinkie finger with a flexible, foot-long antenna — into the reptile last summer.

Even with the tracking device, which he has inserted in about 100 snakes statewide, this search took 45 minutes.

“That tells you why it’s difficult to tell how many are here,” Birk- himer said.

No one has a good estimate of how many timber rattlers call Ohio home. Researchers simply know that the number is low from loss of habitat, poaching, persecution and a slow reproductive process.

It was Wynn who proposed that the snake be listed as “endangered” in Ohio, and it was Wynn who helped develop conservation plans to try to save it from disappearing.

He receives funding from the Ohio Division of Wildlife nearly every year to continue his work. The agency is counting on him to write about 20 of the state’s 25 snakes for an ambitious book on Ohio reptiles and amphibians.

“Ohio’s blessed with a number of really skilled and talented herpetologists,” said Carolyn Caldwell, a program administrator at the wildlife division.

“Doug is one of the few we rely on for scientific research on the eastern massasauga rattlesnake, the timber rattlesnake and the eastern plains garter snake.

“He’s developed the expertise on the biology, life cycle and habitat because of his repeated hands-on work with the species.”

Wynn is in demand to teach the public, ecologists and hunters about snakes.

He’s called by state park managers as well as state officials in the natural resources, wildlife and forestry divisions when a rare snake has been found or if logging, drilling, mining or construction might interfere with a rare snake’s habitat.

He has performed necropsies to determine whether a snake died naturally or was purposely killed by a human. Endangered snakes are protected by Ohio law. Poaching or killing them can result in six months in jail, a $1,000 fine and up to $2,500 in restitution.

Wynn has spent countless summer days in Shawnee, which he said is home to at least 15 species of snakes.

“It’s one of the best places to see earth snakes,” he said. “We know so little about them, we don’t know if they should be considered endangered.”

On this day, his party also found a copperhead, which was weighed, measured, checked for its gender, and injected with an identification tag the size of a grain of rice. (A device reads it like a bar code.) The same had been done with a young black racer and timber rattler found the day before.

Information for all three is later entered into a database Wynn keeps.

Of the three, it’s the timber rattler he worries the most about.

“Their reproductive strategy is so slow, their survival depends on them living to be 25 to 40 years old,” Wynn said.

That was no problem when the snakes were common across the state. But loss of habitat and hunting has hurt the rattler. Wynn said he grew up in a family that killed any snake it found.

Wynn also looks for snakes at Kildeer Plains Wildlife Area in Wyandot County, home to massasaugas and eastern plains garters.

The massasauga had been seen in 22 counties early last century, but more recently in only 15. The snakes spend summers in the dry uplands and winters in crayfish holes in the wetlands. (They spend the cold months beneath the water, hibernating. They survive by not even taking a breath.)

Wynn drives to Kildeer Plains every day in August to study the snakes as they give birth. Baby snakes remain encased in a soft membrane inside a pregnant female and are born “live.”

The eastern plains garter snake is found only at Kildeer. Its numbers have dropped sharply since the 1970s.

“We don’t know why,” Wynn said. “At first, we thought it was because of the mowing and burning, but the snakes are most common where the county mows.

“Was it inbreeding? No. The University of Tennessee did the genetic work” that showed enough variability for the population to reproduce.

“Are they being out-competed by common garters? It doesn’t look like it.

“It may be a long-term population fluctuation.”

While Wynn seeks answers, his work provides snakes to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and the Columbus Zoo & Aquarium for a captive breeding program to try to stabilize the population.

“We’ve released more than 200 snakes over the years,” said Doug Warmolts, the Columbus Zoo’s assistant director of living collections.

Tagged snakes are found years later, showing that they can survive.

Warmolts said snakes deserve the same protection as the giant panda or Siberian tiger.

“A van Gogh is a few dollars’ worth of paint and canvas, but the intrinsic value we place on it is priceless. We need to look at wildlife the same way.”

Scott Moody, a biology professor at Ohio University, said there are selfish reasons, too.

“Species that people are squeamish about are good indicator species. We measure how good a habitat is by the diversity of insects, spiders and amphibians and reptiles.

“If that diversity falls off, that may greatly impact the health of people.”

Wynn and Moody co-wrote The Ohio Turtle, Lizard and Snake Atlas, which was published by the division of wildlife and the Ohio Biological Survey in 2006. The book is an identification guide for Ohio reptiles.

Wynn, Moody and several other herpetologists are writing the state’s first comprehensive book telling how these animals live. It is scheduled for publication by 2012.