HARTFORD COURANT (Connecticut) 03 December 06 Snakes On The Brain - Chuck Smith Traveled More Than 1,800 Miles In The State Tracking Copperheads (Steve Grant)
Venturing off a hiking trail in Meriden, Chuck Smith scrambled up a steep hillside of fallen, craggy rocks known as talus. Beside a slab of rock about 3 feet long by 3 feet wide, he stopped.
"Somewhere under that rock, in this jumble of talus, there are a lot of copperheads," he said. Dozens of them, hibernating for the winter.
Smith was part way up the side of one of the state's most distinctive geologic features, the Metacomet Ridge that runs north-south through the center of the state, a ridge that is lapped on both sides by ever-developing suburbia.
That ridge is also the epicenter of the Connecticut range of the copperhead, a poisonous snake that tends to run 30 inches long in these woods. And when it comes to the copperheads of Connecticut, nobody knows them like Smith, a University of Connecticut graduate student finishing work on a doctorate degree.
The Willington resident hiked more than 1,800 miles in central Connecticut for three years studying the copperheads, visiting the ridge an average of five days a week for eight months each of those years. Virtually every moment he monitored the movements of copperheads, after implanting radio transmitters in 35 males and females.
Not only has Smith advanced scientific knowledge of the species, said Kurt Schwenk, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UConn who is Smith's adviser, but more important it was carried out long-term, involved a large number of animals and therefore yielded insights that a less ambitious study couldn't produce.
"This is classic field biology," Schwenk said. "It is not only grueling work; it is just critical to understanding how organisms behave in the wild. There is no substitute for spending time with your animal in the field."
Smith's research led to a series of revelations about copperheads, while swatting away some widely held assumptions.
Think that snakes just slither around in the woods randomly? Smith's radio-tagged snakes demonstrated otherwise.
Take the snake that in Smith's research came to be known as 06A. "Male 06A will be under this rock," Smith said. "Come early May he will be in that rock pile down there. And then come June, he'll be in this tree stump on top of the ridge. He knows year-to-year exactly where he is and where he needs to go to do his business. It's amazing. They have this spatial awareness you don't associate with snakes."
Smith found the snakes so predictable in their movements that on occasion when a transmitter battery died and he lost contact with a snake, he'd check where it was on that date a year earlier - and find it. That happened with 06A. "We went to the rock pile where he was that time a year before. He was there."
Gordon W. Schuett, an adjunct professor at Georgia State University and a snake expert, said Smith's work was invaluable because it shed light on a species that is a significant predator, or keystone predator, where it is found in Connecticut.
"Whenever you have an abundance of a keystone predator, the impact on the ecosystem has to be something that reflects that number. It has to be impressive. It has to be significant," he said. And any time a scientist studies a predator that is a keystone species, "you're doing a service," he said.
Copperheads are one of two poisonous snake species found in Connecticut, the other being the timber rattlesnake. But, Smith said, among poisonous snakes the copperhead is not a particularly dangerous snake.
He said he was not aware of any fatal bites from a copperhead in Connecticut, and said a fatal bite was extremely unlikely. The typical reality, he said, is that a copperhead bite is more like a bad bee sting - "swelling for a few hours and that is about it." He was bitten twice himself handling copperheads during the study, and did nothing more than wait out the pain and swelling. Only a severe bite might require an emergency room visit, he said.
He described his bites as instances where he became careless - "a quick reminder that you need to exercise a little more care."
For those who hike along the ridge, Smith said there is little to worry about.
"The animals are not going to attack you, they aren't going to chase you," he said. "They would just as soon you pass right by and not see them. It doesn't do them any good to interact with you, because typically they are on the losing end of the relationship."
"Most of the bites that occur, occur under circumstances where people are harassing or otherwise trying to interact with the animal," he said.
With a patchy pattern of browns, tan and rust colors, copperheads blend in perfectly with the dead leaves found on the forest floor and in cavities between rocks. Because of that, they are not often seen, even when people pass right by them.
Among his findings, Smith saw identifiable personality differences among copperheads, something most people would hardly suspect of a snake species.
"They have the same individuality as your dog would show. You know which ones you can walk up to, and which ones you need to give distance to. Some will be more aggressive, and some will allow you to sit right next to them and photograph them," he said.
There was one male that Smith repeatedly stepped on by mistake it blended so well into the leaves. "He'd turn and look at me; he'd give me a look," Smith said.
Then there was the promiscuous male, who could be found with many females during the breeding season, though he had one female he liked in particular. "He'd go off, find these other females, then go back to her, then on to another female, then back to her. They're definitely individuals."
People also assume that snakes have little or no social structure, and it is widely thought they are not monogamous.
"But we have seen at least in one instance here where a male and a female stayed together for a whole summer and moved throughout the habitat quite a distance as a pair. And we assume because it was summer and breeding season they were together as a breeding pair. That is pretty much unheard of in snakes," he said.
An important part of Smith's research was looking at how far males and females moved at different times of the year. His research confirmed what scientists suspected but had not proved: that male snakes move greater distances during the breeding season, to locate and breed with as many females as possible. Smith's radio tracking determined that males will travel nearly a mile sometimes.
Moreover, he determined that the fork in the tongues of males is more deeply divided, thought to be an advantage in following a chemical trail - which females likely leave as they move about. And hormone levels in males increase during breeding season, he determined from periodic blood samples taken from the snakes.
In the fall, all the snakes in his 1,100-acre study area returned to only two locations on talus slopes to spend the winter. Each snake returns to the same hibernation location each year, without fail.
All of it adds up to the most comprehensive look yet at Connecticut copperheads.
"His work will be, I believe, widely read by vertebrate biologists at large, not just snake people," Schuett said.
Snakes, of course, are not always appreciated, but Schuett noted that they are a significant presence in an ecosystem, eating many small mammals, especially mice, voles and moles. Removing snakes from an ecosystem might have a major if unpredictable impact, Schuett said.
"We always say, `Don't tinker with it if you don't know what is going to happen,'" he said.
Smith finds the snakes nothing but interesting. He traces his interest in snakes to the day his mother gave him a garter snake when he was 8 years old.
"I kept it in a cardboard box in the basement and had it for a long time. It started the whole thing," he said. By the time he was a teen with a part-time job he was spending all his money on books about snakes.
For many people, most people in all likelihood, the vision of dozens of snakes while sleeping would constitute a nightmare. Smith often sees masses of exotic snakes while he is sleeping. Everywhere he looks there are snakes, species from all over the world.
He calls those images dreams.
Snakes On The Brain

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