ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE (Fayetteville) 31 July 06 Marion County snakes convene for second year (Julie Stewart)
Yellville: People in the know watch their step when evening falls at Chuck Miller’s place.
For the second summer in a row, Miller’s remote mountaintop home in Marion County has become a gathering place for copperhead snakes. He has counted roughly 40 copperheads since the first few appeared July 13, almost a year to the day of the snakes’ arrival last summer.
Their modus operandi is the same, too. The snakes mass beneath the same cedar tree as last year. They arrive suddenly about 8 p. m., stay for an hour or so, and then disappear.
“It’s just like they’re on a clockwork,” Miller said last week.
Also, once again, Professor Stanley E. Trauth is on the case.
Copperheads come together in the fall as they head to winter hibernation sites. They also congregate in the spring. But such group behavior in the heat of summer is quite odd, said Trauth, a professor of zoology and director of the Electron Microscope Facility at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.
Nearly all the snakes on Miller’s property are males, Trauth said, “which is really unusual.”
“Those females are going elsewhere, utilizing a different region of the mountainside. That in itself is interesting, the lack of adult and juvenile females.”
Last summer, Trauth speculated that the snakes under Miller’s cedar tree might have been following scent trails left by other copperheads.
This year, he’s developing a new idea based on temperature differences in the area.
Temperature loggers placed on Miller’s property this summer by an ASU graduate student are producing interesting readings.
“There is a difference, a major difference, between certain areas of the habitat as far as temperature goes. So there may be a temperature cue taking place here, where the snakes are following a temperature gradient of some sort,” Trauth said.
“But we still don’t know,” he added, declining to be more specific about the various readings.
Miller, 36, moved to Marion County six years ago from Illinois, settling on a rugged, remote mountaintop between Flippin and Yellville.
The cedar tree where the snakes gather is about 150 feet from his two-story, cedar-shingled house.
An avid outdoorsman who has kept snakes as pets, Miller limits the nighttime movements of his 8-year-old son, Chase; his daughter, Paige, 9; and his dogs since the snakes began appearing again.
He has spent many evenings rounding up the copperheads and placing them in a barrel for Trauth’s graduate student to collect and take to ASU for more study.
“My boy just turned 8, and he’s helping us catch them. He mainly just holds the flashlight, but he’s out there with us,” Miller said.
Radio transmitters have been placed in the body cavities of two snakes, allowing Miller and the graduate student to track them. When one snake stayed in a brush pile for a considerable time, they investigated and found the copperhead and its transmitter inside a speckled kingsnake that had been lounging in the brush. The kingsnake had eaten the copperhead.
Copperheads are pit vipers, venomous snakes with a heatsensitive pit on their snouts that they use to sniff out prey. Rattlesnakes and cottonmouths are also pit vipers.
Trauth is an expert on Arkansas snakes. He co-authored The Amphibians and Reptiles of Arkansas (University of Arkansas Press, 2004) with biology professors Michael Plummer of Harding University in Searcy and Henry W. Robison of Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia.
Copperheads range throughout Arkansas. Known as “sitand-wait” predators, they stay in one spot and wait for their prey to come by. Copperheads also are responsible for most of the snakebites in the United States, according to Trauth’s book, but their bites are rarely fatal — with a death rate estimated at 0. 01 percent. The most frequent symptoms are pain, swelling, breathing difficulty and swelling.
Miller said he wished the general public had a better appreciation of snakes.
“I am not a tree hugger,” he said, adding that he would kill a venomous snake that threatened to harm him or others.
Still, Miller said: “Not all snakes are bad. If you don’t like the poisonous ones, at least let the ones that are not poisonous live.”
Trauth, meanwhile, expressed confidence that he and his students will solve the mystery.
“We’re following this event, and we’ll continue to follow it in the future, too. So we’ll know more and eventually, I’ll be able to saying something, I hope, for certainty about what’s going on.”
Marion County snakes convene for second year

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